This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply (no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered) but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with two exceptions.
First, there’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth journal on the ongoing virus panic and related issues, so anything Covid-themed should go there instead.
Second, I’ve had various people try to launch discussions about AIs — that is to say, large language models (LLMs) and the utilities they power — on this and my other forums. The initial statements and their followup comments always end up reading as though they were written by LLMs — that is, long strings of words superficially resembling meaningful sentences but not actually communicating anything. That’s neither useful nor entertaining. Thus I’ve decided to ban further discussion of this latest wet dream of the lumpen-internetariat here.
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I’m also delighted to report two new books of mine are available for preorder. The Way of the Secret Temple is the third and final volume in the Golden Section Fellowship sequence of training manuals, following The Way of the Golden Section and The Way of the Four Elements. Like the two earlier volumes, it provides a systematic course of training in classic Western occultism, focusing on meditation and inner energy alchemy. It’ll be out this coming spring, but can be preordered here in hardback or paperback editions.
The Carnelian Moon is the third of my Ariel Moravec occult detective stories. As Ariel stumbles her way through the first steps in magical training under the guidance of her adept grandfather Dr. Bernard Moravec, a new case comes her way. Investigating the provenance of an ancient bronze plaque from pre-Roman Italy seems dull at first, but a cascade of strange occurrences gathers around the plaque, hinting at connections with the wolf-priests of a forgotten god — and with the reality behind the old legend of the werewolf. Can Ariel and her grandfather uncover the secret behind the plaque before it vanishes forever? Copies can be preordered here.
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With that said, have at it!
Thinking about symbolism and looking at images of the Russian military cathedral, this turned up:
https://imgur.com/Y0C1MgW
But ‘what is that?’ and zoomed in:
https://imgur.com/cqgNWsz
and zoomed in again:
https://imgur.com/OqwarZR
Does anyone have any ideas what is going on in this image?
An early happy American Thanksgiving to you and your readers!
A commenter on a liberal blog responded to the election results and particularly the educational levels of Trump’s voters by asking “Can you show us on the doll exactly where the educated professionals hurt you?” He meant it as a joke, but I think it is worth taking seriously. I know of no better forum to get answers than here, so I’m throwing it open to you and your readers.
I have a question. Now and then I have been indulging in the torrent of digital sludge on places like YouTube. Especially interesting is YouTube shorts, clips of tens of seconds in a never ending stream.
As a kid I used to love staying up late to watch infomercials after midnight and observe my brain slowly being shaped from “oh my good look at this stupid crap” to the point where a hint of “I need to buy some of these” make its mark upon me. Infomercials were carefully crafted purposeful forms of brain washing.
My question- what effects are this torrent of digital sludge having on people’s minds? Its only constructed purpose is to retain the viewer’s attention for as long as possible, administered by an algorithm that observes which clips you skip past within the first second and giving you less of those type. If you watch anything more than once you get more of those.
Observing my own mind as I consume this material has an odd effect, one I don’t think the people who created it are aware of. It is as if my mind is becoming intolerant of the whole concept of online video the more I watch. I find myself wildly swiping past everything, shutting off the computer and going outside.
I’m a big believer in psychological and cultural immune systems. Is the insult of modern digital media what is finally needed to trigger a transformation?
Hello JMG,
In the UK, November 1st – 10th saw the longest dunkelflaute I can recall in over 15 years of watching for these events. Though the weather was very mild for the time of year, overcast, almost windless conditions persisted over the British Isles and surrounding seas almost throughout. At its worst, from the 3rd to the 6th and again on the 9th, wind power was rarely able to supply more than 5% of electricity and was often below 3% during peak demand periods in early evening. Solar rarely reached 3% and only produced anything of note for 5-6 hours per day. At peak times nearly 20% of electricity was being directly imported by cable from continental Europe and Scandinavia, with natural gas providing up to 60% of generation with nuclear at about 12% and other odds and ends providing the rest.
At present the UK government wants to approximately quadruple wind and solar generation capacity by 2030. Goodness knows where the money will come from and it’s almost certainly an impossible construction task anyway. They also plan to phase out gas boilers for electric heat pumps, so increasing electricity demand. The time scale for that is uncertain but they have already banned gas installations in new houses. Meanwhile, all but one of our nuclear stations are due to close as life-expired by the end of the decade by which time millions more electric cars are likely to be on the roads, though it seems they are beginning to back away from their original plan to ban sales of all combustion-engined cars by 2030. Still, the government dreams of a zero-carbon electricity grid by 2035, which presumably means most or all gas-fired generating stations being closed down and it continues wittering about carbon-capture, hydrogen, etc.
A mighty collision between these plans and reality cannot be far off. It will be interesting to see the public outcry when we get the first power cuts in a winter dunkelflaute, which has maybe an even chance of happening in the next couple of years. As for toppling this government as has been speculated upon recently, it’s difficult to see how it could happen. In contrast to Scholz in Germany who headed an intrinsically unstable coalition, Starmer has a huge majority over a divided opposition so maybe he will stumble on for another four years.
Hi JMG,
A few years ago there was a brief discussion in the comments about map projections, especially with regard to the ubiquitous Mercator projection. I have since produced my own map set in C1500 ad that hopefully has created something a bit more interesting. I’ve tried to produce a less Eurocentric map that also captures the vastness of Africa and Asia. In addition North isn’t up! Here is a link to the image https://www.deviantart.com/newhistoricalmaps/art/Orthographic-map-of-the-world-C-1500-AD-1125887728 (I’ll add a higher resolution one later). Anyway, I thought this might be of interest to readers here.
Hi JMG,
Several months ago I asked you for sources on Ramon Llull and his combinatorial system. The ones you suggested were great, and also pointed the way to additional sources that I have been working through. I’m still in the shallow end of this very deep pool, but between reading, meditating on the elements of his system, and writing monthly essays on what I have learned, it’s all beginning to come into focus. So thank you for the excellent starting point.
My question is if you (and/or other academically trained commenters) have any tips for navigating academic research without access to a university. I studied computer science (no degree) and building preservation and restoration (associates degree) so I never learned anything about that in school. What is the best/most cost-effective way to get access to academic articles? Do you have any methods of tracking down obscure information that you can share?
Thank you for sharing your knowledge so generously!
I know many of us in this community have been quite hopeful about the possibility of real change with a Trump administration, after watching the people he is appointing to the Cabinet and other key posts (especially in domestic affairs – foreign policy may end up being more of the same).
What is this community’s opinion on the chances of a) many key appointees actually getting confirmed and b) more broadly any significant change actually happening, beyond symbolic stuff?
In particular, it is going to be near impossible to pass legislation for anything significant (like actually abolishing the Department of Education) but even with stuff that doesn’t require legislation I am somewhat sceptical about how much they can actually get done.
The more cynical view here by Curtis Yarvin seems to me (sadly) likely to be the right one. There will be some symbolic victories etc but the bureaucracy will fight back to save itself and it is not in the personal interests of the people in DC to actually make significant changes (it’s in the interests of the country though). And all this is despite the best efforts and sincere intentions of people like RFK and Jay Bhattacharya and others.
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/its-easy-from-here
(He basically says the above and says that you have to take control of Congress, not the Presidency to make significant change)
A literary question: do any of you happen to share my disappointment with John Dos Passos’ trilogy “USA”? Given the scope implied by the title, I looked forward to a kaleidoscopically multi-hued saga, but in my view the leftist slant of the work (yes I know workers were oppressed etc etc) results in a rather monochrome mood.
Hi JMG,
I’m interested in learning more about occult resources or organizations that teach the practice of—for lack of a better term—“clearing” a haunted place, such as a house. I’m thinking here especially of houses that have a persistent haunting to the point where they become almost unlivable. Or, maybe, you aren’t aware of any such teachings that you would consider reputable and efficacious?
Thank you!
JMG, you claim that we reincarnate. Who or what decides your next life, after you die? Is it done according to your faith or your god, if you worship one? And if so, what about atheists and agnostics?
I do not like the idea of reincarnation. I am hugely risk-averse. Do I manage to get safely through one life, only to endure another? Not everywhere is as safe as England, and maybe England won’t be in the near future.
I remember that you once wrote that you yourself are very risk-averse. Given this, how do YOU feel about reincarnation?
I did once have a dream that I worked in a family restaurant, somewhere in the Middle East circa 1950. It lasted hours, and when I woke up I thought, “Whose dream was that?! It certainly wasn’t mine!”
Hey John and commentariat,
I haven’t seen much of JMG on podcasts recently- have you slowed down on doing interviews?
Thanks,
Matt
I was thinking about how differently the downhill slope of empire is looking compared to how I thought it would look 25 years ago. Back then I was aware that resource and cheap energy depletion alone would send us in to decline, but as a child of the 70’s I thought it would take a much different shape.
Back in the 70’s when inflation bit, wars were lost and oil got more expensive and scarce the US responded by going to smaller cars, lower speed limits, insulating houses, a bike boom, a boom in gardening etc. So I naively assumed when we got knee deep in the real decline ( the 1970’s was just a practice run) things would play out the same way.
But instead the establishment took and entirely different route, Financialization and delusion. Instead of downsizing and economizing like we did in the 70’s we lowered interest rates, printed money and pumped up the price of assets to make everyone feel richer ( an illusion).
I had thought the suburbs, strip malls, and drive thru would have disappeared with $5.00 per gallon gas. But as we now know those things have been turbocharged along with bigger cars, bigger houses, food delivery, and even more extravagant uses of energy, money and resources than we even imagined in the 70’s. Grade schoolers flying to far off locations for baseball tournaments, people spending extravagant amounts on pets including ” Pet Hotels”, Huge televisions in every room, giant SUV’s that the average late 70’s car could fit inside of.
JMG, did you see things shaping up this way back in the early 90’s? From the perspective of our current experience it makes sense that the elites would choose this path, even though it means a much harder fall. But was I the only one that didn’t see it coming?
Hey JMG
Awhile ago I mentioned that the Australian government was considering a ban on social media for anyone under 16 years old. It appears to be on track to happening, though I am not holding my breath yet.
I wanted to ask if you have followed up on it, and if you had any thoughts about its practicality and significance?
I’ve been keeping tabs on a few of my old liberal blog favorites – specifically Balloon Juice and Driftglass – and it has struck me that their reactions to the election are oddly serene. Oddly, because these writers have fully signed onto the blue side of the culture war.
Something clicked for me this morning, though: They’ve gotten exactly what they wanted.
In your discussion of the Changer myth, you point out that those who opposed the Changer were changed so that they remained fixed in their oppositional behavior. Behold! There’s a certain fraction of Democrats who so fully embraced The Resistance(tm) that they never moved past it. Now that Trump is back in office, all is right with the world, in an oddly inverted way.
I mean, consider how Harris and other Democrats would become angry and baffled whenever anyone pointed out that they couldn’t be running against the current Presidential administration, because they were the current Presidential administration. In a sense, they’re still locked in 2016.
JMG,
Wondering what you think RFK’s chances of getting confirmed are.
If he doesn’t, do you think his national profile will have increased at all?
Thanks,
Pierre
For the Golden Section Fellowship, is this all the books, or am I missing one? (And is this the right order to study them?)
The Sacred Geometry Oracle Book and Cards
The Way of the Golden Section
The Occult Philosophy Workbook
The Earth Mysteries Workbook
The Way of the Four Elements
The Way of the Secret Temple
Thank you!
(And, to everyone who celebrates it, Happy Thanksgiving!)
I thought I’d repost my last comment from the last post. I want to wish all Americans here and abroad a Happy Thanksgiving as well.
I think instead of corporate liberalism we need cooperative liberalism. Instead of more traditional liberal principles getting co-opted and recuperated into the AI Borg-Board Skynet hive mind, they need to get co-op’ed and rejuvenated by workers and doer’s and Diggers with dirt underneath the nails flowing and organic. Low key entrepreneurial small is beautiful business populism to balance the plutocratic brutalist cybertruck, bigger is better, entrepreneurial elites coming into power. People who only want to put their corn, or whatever else may be there harvest, into silos, and not silo off their minds to the other side of the aisle. Pluralistic conversationalist and raconteurs drinking the wine of the new weird America. Religiously accepting and universalist in outlook of the ways we can all approach the divine in our own way, reveling in the diversity of not just cultural backgrounds and intersexual intersectionist preferences, but actually on the corner of the intersection talking to people who come by, and happy to agree to disagree again, but still drink an African-American root doctor beer together. People who don’t cut off their family for picking a candidate, and can stuff it for Thanksgiving so we can eat stuffing together. Defenders of free speech even if it is ugly speech we personally abhor. Letting the gunslingers take a crack shot at the empty Coke/Pepsi aluminum or glass drones of the bland uniparty cola we collectively swim in. We the people forming the base of power, and local and state the next layer, and the federal government being the smallest point of the triangle of government. Sex strikes only for monastic celibates who burn with the secret fire. Let’s get it on and let’s stay together. Happy Thanksgiving everyone.
Hello JMG and kommentariat. I’m reading now the book “Before the Collapse”, by the Italian scientist Ugo Bardi (spanish translation). You maybe know Mr. Bardi has a sudden collapse theory in his writings , the “Seneca effect”. I think he’s wrong, because every big “collapse” in the human History seems the same old story of long and “dull” decline and fall, but I don’t have the wisdom and universitarian studies for debunking him neatly as contrafactical…
Now, I’d like to ask you, if you don’t mind:
Why decline and not fast collapse?
Do you have ever met Bardi in person or virtually? Did you have a good argument?
@Batstrel: If I may, being risk averse didn’t stop you from being born into your current incarnation.
Hi JMG,
I came across this article in my internet travels. The author speaks of you, so I thought you might be interested.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-151606366
Dear John, I have a few questions below in a ramble/rant format.
1) An important part of practicing occultism is learning to replace habits with choices and ‘wake up,’ so to speak. I have been having such a difficult time with this. I feel that I am entirely a creature of habit and that I move along by the inertia of my lowest tendencies. How do I get out of this rut that I am in? What practical daily things can I do to break out of this? What activities should I avoid or moderate? I practice meditation each day but I just don’t think I am getting anywhere. It goes without saying that I am depressed and miserable being this way. I just want to break free.
2) Which one of your books (or books written by others) would you recommend for someone starting to practice occultism? What daily practices are the most important, and what ducks should a student have in a row before they start practicing?
3) I have heard you say before that you somewhat identify as a Gnostic, but more in the world-affirming Hermetic sense. If you think that gnosis is attainable, how do you attain gnosis?
Is the god of Progress just Lucifer in disguise?
My condolences on the death of your father. Two close-family deaths in ten months is too much for a psyche+body to take. Yeah, more than one commenter here said it was a one-two punch. Knocks the wind out of a person. You may be running on empty, and feel out of whack, for a few weeks. Very, very uncomfortable. I have read you long enough to know you know how to take care of yourself.
Sleep is a good restorative. When I feel upset (like triggered to anger) and nothing I do (or nothing anyone does, or nothing anyone CAN do), is able to calm me down (I typically calm myself by sitting and closing the eyes), in order to thoroughly re-set, I have to fall asleep for at least a couple hours. Actually lately, I have felt ‘on edge’ considerably more the last few weeks than usual, which I attribute to vibes surrounding the ‘world situation’ (like Ukulele-rain), which sitting-and-closing-eyes helps NOT a twit—I must nap in order to let go.
Gods bless…
💨Northwind Grandma💨🪦🛌
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Hi JGM, Hi Industrial Alchemy,
I’m interested in learning the discursive meditation method by Ramon Llull.
Were shall I beging?
I ‘m fluent in Spanish and I can read english but not latin.
Thanks in advance for everything,
Tired21
@earthworm #1
Clearly, it’s one of the tentacle-faced priests of Cthulhu that the Russian clergy summoned to their aid. He’s overseeing the ceremony. 😛
Really, I think it’s just a guy in civilian clothes and a long scarf standing there. You can see another person in civilian clothes and a medical mask to the left, he’s taking a photo. Why are there civilians there, who can say.
Hello Mr Greer,
My condolences on your recent loss.
I’ve been working my way through your Druid Magic Handbook, and am currently focusing on the ogham. I bought some cards, and discovered that some of the symbols on the cards don’t match the ones in your book, for example, Faern and Saille are swapped, Phagos is upside down, and Mor is on the opposite side of the vertical line, among others. Having my curiosity kindled, I looked them up online, and see they’re different there, too. Would you please tell me why this is?
Thank you
From American Scientist, Sept-Oct issue: “Mayan Agroforestry.” Which sounds a lot like pre-Ice-Age permaculture. They managed their forests and fields, which were either interchangeable or blended together. Until the Spanish came, according to the article.
John,
I recently had to part ways with my lodge (Martinist/Rosicrucian tradition) due to reasons that I don’t care to get into, but I wanted to ask you about esoteric groups that you know of and can recommend here in the U.S that are 1) legitmate (or “contacted” as they say) 2) trustworthy 3) have a comprehensive system of Hermetic training and initiation. The previous group I was involved with was based out of Europe, so naturally I am looking for something much closer to home. I’m looking for something extremely practical without a ton of religious jargon (although I have no issues with Christian symbolism), and I have no interest in anything related to Crowley or “left hand” stuff. Any ideas? Thanks.
Eagle Fang Warrior 5000 WROTE:
“@Batstrel: If I may, being risk averse didn’t stop you from being born into your current incarnation.”
That wasn’t my fault or decision. My mother had mastitis and was told that having a child would sort it. So she did and her mastitis went away. She certainly wasn’t the mother I wanted. But then how many people are lucky enough to have been happy with both parents?
For those of you in America, do you see business and restaurants putting up Christmas decorations already, a week before Thanksgiving?
I have an idea, which I want to throw out to the commentariat in general, about how to resolve the situation in Gaza.
Back in the 1930’s, when Hitler was rampaging all over Europe, a group of people approached President Roosevelt, and begged him to offer asylum to all the Jews of Europe as a humanitarian gesture.
Roosevelt (who was nobody’s fool) refused, because he knew that he would be politically crucified if he did so.
Well, that was then, and this is now. I think things have changed since then.
I can tell you that, outside of the United States, the peoples of the rest of the world are sick and tired of the Zionist State of Israel, and want to see it disappear. As you (JMG) said many years ago, the U. S. will ultimately lose its ability to prop up the existence of Israel by sheer military might alone. Thus, the demise of the State of Israel is only a matter of time.
Given his extremely close relationship with powerful Jewish families (like the Adelsons), I think Trump is in a uniquely favorable position to propose to the “Israel lobby” that every Jew in the world be allowed to settle in the U. S., in exchange for winding up Israel as a state. In other words, evacuate all the Jews from the Middle East, then make peace with all the remaining countries in the area.
Given that there are already more Jews in the U. S. than any other country on earth (including Israel!), this should be feasible. It will be even more feasible if Trump makes good his promise to massively deport the tens of millions of illegal aliens already in the country.
I think this may be an 85-year-old idea whose time has finally come.
Comments, everyone?
JMG,
A thought keeps popping up to me over the last week or so. It is that we seem to be in a battle between two archetypes (whatever archetypes actually are). One of them is rather similar to Wotan, if not the old sky rider himself, and seems to originate from Europe. Perhaps it is guiding spirit of Faustian civilization in final stages. The other is of course the Changer, which is coming from our continent.
Is this thought just a brain fart, a dah – obvious or something significant?
Dear JMG and commentariat:
I have been slowly coming to a hypothesis that the current state of Western civilization is such that it tends to drive people insane. If someone had told me in, say 1980, the ideas that are argued as being “right” or what everyone should think, or the actions of people and governments (for example, Covid, Ukraine war, sex change operations for children, etc.), I would have said “You’re crazy!”
I think some of this is that with the decline of organized religion, religious belief seems to be moving to “progress”, or “progressive thought”. Thus, if you say Ukraine is not winning the war (or that it is in Russia’s historical sphere of influence and no Russian government could accept Ukraine as a Western ally), you are a Putin apologist. Or, unlimited immigration is pure good, no downsides, and our society must completely accommodate them, and any questions you are racist, a bad person, etc. And TDS; good heavens! I could go on forever, but …
Am I wrong? Society does seem insane to me; people seriously insist on things that are absurd, the absence of anything resembling careful thought, reflection, fact-finding, the endless shrieks that anyone who disagrees is evil, racist, misogynistic, hateful (while they spew hate at their target); wow.
Am I wrong? Are there other reasons for this state of affairs (which I would think there are)?
Finally, a happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate it; and mail all have reasons to be thankful.
Cugel
Greetings to the Grandmaster of DOOM!
There is a dead cat bounce of sorts for interest in Mars and asteroid mining. Where do you think these sentiments are coming from?
To clarify: by my question, I mean to ask… what specific drives in Faustian man do you feel are currently making him suddenly worship Elon Musk, SpaceX and related Techno-Utopianisms?
I wrote an essay a few days ago where I touched on how the limits to growth (energy, metals and minerals, demography, ecology, etc) mean an earthbound future… however a common knee jerk response I got was that ‘Human innovation and ability to create tech solutions” is unbounded.
There is definitely a religious sentiment and deep seated faith underneath those desperate promulgations of so called ‘boundless innovation,’ but what do you, Grandmaster, think are the root causes behind such fantasy thinking?
Thank You Again, and myself & sir Kenaz look forward to hosting both yourself and Malcom for an auspicious December sitdown to go over the Astrology of nations… looking forward to it! 😉
I am GIVING away two useful items.
A solar food dryer, built according to the plans in Ebon Fodor’s 2006 book, “The Solar Food Dryer: How to Make and Use Your Own Low-Cost, High Performance, Sun-Powered Food Dehydrator.”
Visit https://www.amazon.com/Solar-Food-Dryer-Performance-Sun-Powered/dp/0865715440 if you want to look inside the book.
Our solar dryer has about 10 square feet of drying space, is built of plywood, glass, screens, etc., exactly according to Fodor’s plans. We used it for many years and then for many more years it sat in our toolshed.
The book comes along with the solar dryer.
They need a new home. You’ll need to do some minor repairs to the solar dryer. I’d also add (these weren’t in the plans and should have been) castors to the legs so you can more easily rotate the dryer to stay facing into the sun.
A 50 gallon rain barrel. I no longer need it because I’ve got the yard bermed and swaled so I don’t have to fool with the rain barrel.
You MUST come get them! I’d prefer it if you took both items.
I will also cross post this offer at Frugal Friday.
I live in Hershey, PA, in central Pennsylvania.
Email me at tdbpeschel @ gmail.com, removing the spaces before and after the @ symbol if you’d like either item or both!
Hi from the UK JMG,
A few days ago I heard two people on the bus arguing if Trump’s victory means peak woke (radical progressivism). Both seemed to be of the opinion that it would be a good thing if it did (especially gratifying for me since both were quite young) but while one thought that it would, another believed it would make those who opposed Trump complacent while the progressive left worked furiously to go back on the offensive again.
Do you think 5th November 2024 will be to the woke madness what 9 Thermidor was to the Jacobin madness (without the rolling heads), or will it be just a blip in the fall into the murkier depths of wokery?
And linking to that, what sort of cultural effect if any do you think any changes in America will have on European social and political culture?
@Shane
Sure I can provide a little bit of information.
From what I understand with child and youth populations i work with that have had prolonged exposure to this type of media;
There’s something called screen-induced ADHD that is part of a wider field of understanding towards what this kind of exposure does to the human mind.
During the covid-19 lockdowns therapists were encouraging parents for example to let their children ‘soothe’ on their phones. This created situations that warranted Community responses like building Behavioral addiction programs geared towards social media overuse.
Specifically overuse of these technologies prevents children in developmental stages from growing through real life threat/risk situations that allow them to develop life skills, self confidence, agency.
With boys it’s video games with girls it’s more social media. The design of some of these programs are specific to entrap the minds of children, utilizing dopamine release strategies similar to what you might find in a casino to keep them playing.
Overall deficits in social learning, life skills, emotional regulatiom, academic performance result. So destructive… like any new technology rolled out on the population without any concern for public safety.
I like your thought that there could be Collective response against it. So far I think about a dozen of our ontario provincial school boards have decided to sue social media companies as a respone.
When I left the hospital, I was Ubered home by a friendly man from Qatar. He mentioned he planned on going home because he just didn’t see how things here could go on as they had been. What do all of you think?
Awesome – looking forward to the new books! 🙂
To everybody: I perform a formal blessing each Wednesday to develop my blessing skills, and I‘m grateful to all the people who sign up and thus help me to practice. The post to sign up for the currently upcoming Wednesday can always be found here:
https://thehiddenthings.com/categories/weekly-blessings
As I said, I‘m grateful to anybody who signs up, now or in the future, as often as you like (and yep, please feel free to pass this link on to others who are interested).
Milkyway
Earthworm, I have no idea. Odd.
Neon Vincent, I can indeed. The site of the injury was in the pocketbook. The professional-managerial class presided over, profited from, and gleefully cheered on the process by which a hundred million working class Americans were driven into poverty and misery. I’ve noted before that when I was young, a family of four could get by tolerably well on a single working class income. The collapse of working class incomes and the soaring prices of housing, health care, and most other necessities over the last fifty years didn’t happen by accident, and nearly all the benefits of that process accrued to the professional-managerial class. If the person who asked that question really wants to get into the details, my book The King in Orange covers it in quite some detail.
Shane, I see modern digital media as an IQ test. Those who get sick of it and turn it off pass the test. Those who don’t, fail the test, and the consequence is that they become stupid. I mean that quite literally; the programming (how’s that for truth in advertising!) on visual media is intended to produce unthinking, emotionally driven reactions — that is to say, stupidity.
Robert Morgan, there are many good things that can be done with renewable energy sources but powering the grid isn’t one of them. It’s fascinating to watch how many governments are simply unable to notice the widening gap between promise and performance.
Devonlad, thank you for this! That’s very nicely done.
Industrial, these days the academic community goes out of its way to try to keep its information out of the grubby hands of outsiders. One partial way around that is https://www.academia.edu/ , which posts a great many academic papers for free download; I’ve been seriously hindered in some of my research, though, by the sky-high prices academic publishers charge for their books.
RTPCR, I’m a little more hopeful than that. The ghost hovering over the banquet in DC right now is the decline of the US dollar’s role as global reserve currency; while that’s not a fast process, it’s getting serious traction right now. As that proceeds, it’s going to be harder and harder to borrow money overseas to prop up our gargantuan budget deficits — and that’s going to require a massive pruning of the federal bureaucracy, to get things back into balance. Trump’s victory shows, I think, that a significant faction of the elite classes are on board with that realization. Since a vast amount of federal expenditure isn’t actually authorized by Congress, DOGE has a serious chance of trimming quite a bit of fat off our federal turkey. But we’ll see, of course.
Robert Gibson, I tried reading the first volume many years ago and bogged down early, so yeah, I’d tend to agree with you.
Balowulf, I know of no organization that focuses on such activities. You can certainly get the relevant skills by taking up serious practice of some well-tested system of ceremonial magic, such as the Golden Dawn system, but it’s going to include much more than the art of banishing hauntings.
Batstrel, first of all, keep in mind that if we all reincarnate, nobody can do you any permanent harm at all. Sure, they can kill you, but that just means you shed one body, take a breather on the inner planes, and get a new body in due time. Second, you can’t get safely through one life — no matter what happens, after all, you’re going to die someday — so it seems pointless to worry about it. Finally, you can take action here and now to improve your next life, by living an ethical life and engaging in some form of spiritual practice. That being the case, reincarnation seems very hopeful to me! As to what determines your next life, until you develop a certain level of reflective self-awareness, karma — the sum of all your actions in previous lives — does that; once you begin to awaken, you can start influencing it yourself.
Matt, podcasts come and go in waves. I’ve done one so far this month — afaik, it’s not up yet — and have a couple more scheduled.
Clay, I thought the elites would do this, but that most people wouldn’t follow suit. So, no, you’re not the only one who missed it.
J.L.Mc12, I have very mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, social media is unquestionably bad for kids. On the other, I see this as a major step toward government control of access to social media for everyone, as a means of censorship and information control.
Cliff, I was wondering if that would happen. Thanks for the heads up!
Jacques/Pierre, I’d have to know much more about the inner workings of Washington DC to be able to answer that. The hopeful case is that health care costs have soared so far out of control in recent decades that even the elite may be recognizing it as a problem; putting RFK Jr. in charges of HHS and letting him start enforcing ethical standards there would be a relatively painless way to start fixing that. But we’ll just have to wait and see.
Random, the only one you’re missing hasn’t been published yet: The Life Force Workbook. (I’m still writing it.) As for the order of working on them, however, that’s much more flexible. The Way of the Golden Section comes first (and the oracle deck with it, of course), and The Way of the Four Elements should be done before The Way of the Secret Temple, but when you do the Workbooks, and in what order, is entirely up to you. The order you’ve listed is perfectly fine, but you could also put the Workbooks in between the two later manuals, or what have you.
Eagle Fang, good. A positive vision is a good place to start. What will you yourself do in the year to come to kickstart that future and help make it happen?
Chuaquin, Ugo and I have corresponded, though we’ve never met in person. As for his argument, it’s impossible to prove in advance that our civilization won’t be the exception to every rule, and do the fast crash that so many people fantasize about. I’d simply point out that every other civilization in history, no matter what its size or technological level, has undergone a slow decline rather than a fast crash. (The only exceptions are those that were overwhelmed by technologically more advanced invaders — the Aztecs are an example here.) Furthermore, a good case can be made that we’re already well into the slow decline, while every prediction of a fast crash made so far has flopped. That being the case, I consider the slow decline far more likely.
Bird, thanks for this. William comments here tolerably often; we first started corresponding back in the peak oil era. I hope he’s right about an Aenean civilization!
Anon, (1) overcoming habit and freeing the will is not a fast process. The space you’re in right now is very common, because the first thing that happens when you start trying to use the will is that you realize how little of it you actually have! That’s a crushing discovery but it’s necessary, so that you know where you’re starting from. The fact that you’re practicing daily meditation is excellent — that in itself is the best training for the will there is. You might also find these posts helpful:
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/tag/will
(2) That depends entirely on what kind of occultism the person wants to practice. Occultism is as diverse as science, and the work that will help you get going as a botanist won’t do you much good as an astronomer. (3) Daily meditation and other spiritual exercises!
Dobbs, a case could be made!
Northwind, thanks for this. Yeah, I’ve been under the weather a bit for the last few days, but it’s not a new experience and I’ll get over it — with a whale of a lot of afternoon naps, among other things.
Tired21, modern Lullian practitioner Yanis Dambergs has a fine site here:
https://lullianarts.narpan.net/index.html
He’s posted English translations of all Lull’s works, and computer programs to help you learn the system. It’s an excellent resource, and obviously a labor of love in his part.
Oatmeal, that’s because it’s an Irish system and no two Irish people ever agreed about anything. There’s a clock tower in Cork, I think it is, which has a clock on all four faces; no two of them ever tell the same time, and none of them are accurate. Locals call them “the four liars.” Seriously, there are many variations in the Ogham alphabet, and when you buy a deck it’s a crapshoot which variation it’ll use.
Patricia M, that’s quite correct. Most Native Americans managed their local ecosystems very carefully to maximize human food production; their way of producing food was much more advanced than ours.
Ashlar, that’s always a difficult question, since I have no way of knowing what’s going on in the crawlspaces of any such group. So far I’ve had good experiences with the Societas Rosicruciana in America (sria.org), the Builders of the Adytum (bota.org), the Fraternity of the Hidden Light (lvx.org), the Martinist Order of America (mooa.us), and the branches of the Golden Dawn headed by Chic and Sandra Tabatha Cicero (https://hermeticgoldendawn.org/) and Darcy Kuntz (no website — you have to know somebody). I’d also put in a good word for Freemasonry; the vast majority of Masons have no clue about the meanings of their rituals and symbolism, but male occultists generally end up in the Craft, and it’s the best venue I know of to make contact with them and get invited to invitation-only esoteric groups.
Mark, no, but the groceries and dollar stores are already trotting out the Christmas merchandise here.
Michael, whether it happens in that way, or whether Israel collapses and most of its surviving population ends up fleeing here, it’s quite possible.
John, that hadn’t occurred to me, but you may be on to something. Certainly here in the United States that seems to be the struggle du jour.
Cugel, you’re not wrong. This is the condition that Giambattista Vico called “the barbarism of reflection,” the point at which a society has plunged so deep into abstractions that it goes batshale crazy. Notice that all of the giddily irrational beliefs you’ve named are rooted in the belief that some abstract principle is more real than the world we actually inhabit.
Ahnaf, it’s the last hurrah of the Faustian spirit. European civilization is obsessed with infinite extension along straight lines — it’s not accidental that European cultures are the only people anywhere to have invented linear perspective for their art — and space is the ultimate temptation for such thinking. “To infinity and beyond!” That’s the cry of the Faustian imagination, and the mere fact that the universe isn’t set up to permit that gets no traction in the minds of those drunk on Faustian dreams.
Sam, in the United States this November 5 really does seem to be the dawn of our Thermidorean reaction. The extraordinary collapse of viewership the woke corporate media have suffered since the election, and the total failure of the Democratic Party’s stormtroopers (BLM and Antifa) to do anything in response, are among the signs I’ve been watching. Will that spread to Europe? I have no idea. It’s at least possible that the US will veer one way while Europe goes another — well, at least until Chinese troops parade down the Champs Elysées, as Joséphin Péladan predicted all those years ago.
Your Kittenship, he’s right. It’s possible, you know, that he’s not here legally…
earthworm #1
> What is that?
Good question. I haven’t got a clue. Looks creepy.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🤿
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
RTPCR 7
My impression is that, if need be, a pliable figurehead is put in each ‘top’ cabinet position. Then Trump appoints second-in-command who is the de-facto boss of the department. Congress would be stymied🖕🏼, would they not?
💨Northwind Grandma💨👴🏼🌟
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Mark-
I saw the first little bits of Christmas stuff at Walmart and Dollar Tree right after Labor Day… just a partial shelf at the end of an aisle here and there, but always in a location that can fall under a shopper’s gaze as they come in the front entrance.
Then a couple weeks before Halloween, it went to a whole section of an aisle; and expanded out from there.
@Shane #3
I’m with you on the effect of the short videos. I feel like I’ve developed an allergy to them. A few years ago I used to spend way too many hours a week on Instagram. Since they switched to prioritizing reels, I can’t stand to look at it more than a few minutes each day. In the past I felt like I was really getting slimed with a sort of grimy astrality that would build up in the column above my head and press down on me. I try to pay attention to how different platforms and technologies affect my subtle bodies, and the social media networks (including YouTube) are the loudest and grimiest to me, chaotic and hooked into a lot of noxious stuff. I also didn’t like how they were influencing my speech and writing (way too memey), to say nothing of general ideas/worldviews. I find that long-form media like films feels far cleaner energetically and less jarring to my nervous system, but also, the farther I go on my spiritual path, the more I just want to read and talk to people.
To Ian’s (#37) point, the young-ish people (early to mid 20s) who I work with adore the videos; they are almost never without their phones and struggle greatly when the power goes out. They show videos to me from time to time and I find them so incredibly jarring and gimmicky, like they have the same kind of “hook” that they use over and over. I have a long way to go, but being able to put my phone down for a few hours at a time makes me feel like an adept.
@Balowulf #9
You might want to reach out to Karen Kingston’s space clearing organization. I’ve had good experiences with them for general home clearings, but they are trained to deal with much heavier stuff.
@JMG
I’m so happy to hear there’s another Ariel Moravec book coming out! I loved the Witch of Criswell and I brought The Book of Haatan home to read over the holiday this week. Ariel is the kind of character I would have loved to meet as a girl (I loved Harriet the Spy, for instance), but it’s great to step into her world now. 🙂
@ John of Red Hook #32
I don’t know how receptive many will be to this idea, but I get the distinct feeling that the current Changer Archetype has Loki behind it. I do not say that negatively, for I do not view Loki all that negatively. But I recall one Heathen blogger responding in detail to some Neopagan article condemning President Trump (he was still in his first term at the time) as being basically Loki. The interesting thing is that the blogger’s several posts in response showed Loki in a very different light, and I remember thinking how Trump might very well be being influenced (in a positive manner, IMHO) by the so-called Trickster. Loki, while definitely a trickster in the myths, could also be viewed an agent of change as well. That would be an interesting twist, Wotan in Europe and Loki in North America.
I cant tell you all my plans, because, you Know, Silence.
But I’d like to see more material about worker cooperatives out there, so I will likely try to do my part to get it into the collective conversation.
I already mingle with people on both sides of tbe aisle, but I hope those afflicted with corporate liberalism will be able to listen to why they have been steamrolled. I cant really change others, but another way is to do something you advocate: read old books and talk about those books. In particular foundational philosophy that old school liberals knew about and try and get a 21st century deindustrial version into the mix.
Thats a start. I am open to other suggestions.
@ Clay Dennis RE : Establishment responses.
Alas the money printing option many will take going forward, at least until the bottom drops out. For all those predicting stock market collapse forget, nowadays money can just be printed and stuffed into the market to stabilize it. So long as there isn’t a run on the stock market and that money makes it into the circulating economy, things can be stable even if it only favors the few. It is the same thing that happened with the predictions to Fracking coming to a halt. You can make things look stable even if the fundamentals are rubbish.
Ran Prieur said it best, in the future the stock market will be 10 times as big and we will have 10 times the homeless at the same time.
@J.L.Mc12 and Australia social media ban.
This seams to be a Trojan horse to force digital ID’s into play combined with them try to convince folks back onto our dying mainstream media. On TV they paraded around grieving parents over their daughters suicide, that was when I knew they had finally found the emotional angle to force this through. Also only allowing 24 hours for the public to submit any considerations didn’t help.
Social media is 99% rubbish but a blanket ban is using excessive means that are easier to roll out but have major issues down the line..
Mr Government and Mr Murdock, I will throw my computer in a bath tub long before I kneel down to you on this. *Insert profanity here* . I have seen a lot of people who voted for Labour essentially say they will no longer vote for them based on this. Decent chance we may have PM Peter Dutton this time next year.
Neon Vincent I’ve never had an interaction with an educated professional that did NOT hurt me. Since 1970. School, teachers, administrators, doctors, corporations, government. Never. Not once did they help me. Ever. They did destroy me several times, then go Oooopsie! Though. Doctors especially, but the courts too.
So, I’m not sure what you’re looking for. The failure rate is 100% across the entire USA. Where would anyone start? P.S. I am trained as an educated professional and play one on TV. Would it be amiss for me to say I hate them with the burning fury of a thousand hellfires? The only peace on the earth ever shall be if each is hunted down with a pack of dogs and force-fed a shovel. Short-handled, as Harry McClintock said.
“At present the UK government wants to approximately quadruple wind and solar generation capacity by 2030.”
And for this month, from Zero. To Zero. That is 0 x 4 = 0. Gaggle “Holodomor”. It has a full explanation of their goals.
I can vouch for reincarnation as can many. And, there’s nothing safer. Because you can’t die. It would be stressful instead if you had to get everything right on the first try or, worse, go to hell for it. I mean, by 50 you’re practically a kid! You’ve barely tried a few things twice much less got good at anything. So your perspective on safety is really illuminating in this, as people not consumed with safety have the opposite impression. I guess our host brings up the other half: there’s no sense in running because you’ll die tired anyway. The mortality rate is 100%, as CS Lewis said.
Is the God of Progress Lucifer? Well, we see, combining a few, that Promethueus, the fallen, teach men metals, then immediately swords , and women makeup to get themselves into trouble with. https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe011.htm Indian stories they give them flint (fire) and flint (spears). So all this, what we call “invention” and “Progress” does seem to open the door to all evil. Now is it the item, or that we didn’t discover it ourselves in the natural way, at an appropriate time? Bombs to babies in the nuclear age lacking wisdom and all that.
Why can’t we fast crash? You have no idea how many levers we have to pull, how many things we can liquidate, or how many people we can bump off to slow it. Go outside and look: every single human object you see will have to be sold off, broken down, and liquidated before anyone cries uncle. More, because that takes a very long time, no one “Dies” in it, so they don’t even notice. It’s just you call a doctor less, so a few more people get sick early, a few more babies die young, a few more accidents and murder happen, and no one feels like some “one” up top, is out to get them. Or not more than usual. This is even true of most wars where the fewest people die in combat. Even careful wars more civilians die, and it’s of common things, not even like, starvation. Strange but true. People like me who point out the hard statistics that every 1% rise in unemployment leads to 20,000 deaths are dismissed as cranks, and nothing is done, even when, like Argentina, inflation is 200%. People are like that, and our leaders know it and use it.
Here in The Village, the Christmas trees and decorations are already up, and Christmas items have been onthe shelves in Publix for the past two weeks at least. The Gainesville Sun’s Thanksgiving issue, which just came out today, seems to be all about shopping and travel.
My daughter’ Carol’s house is free from all that, being still focused on Thanksgiving – Her sister Satah and family came in from Colorado Monday evening and we had a little get-together, me and my Colorado family. Sarah was going to fix lunch for me today, and picked me up at 11:30am – only to return to an orgy of pre-making Thanksgiving dishes, spearheaded by Chris, my son-in-law, the family chef. We finally did get lunch out on the deck, including my middle grandson Bryn, who has blossomed out since he went away to college. Christmas before Thanksgiving? Not in their house!
For what that’s worth. I’m overjoyed to see that.
And it was shirtsleeve weather outdoors at lunch time.
And nobody has mentioned Trump or anything the times I’ve been over there since the election; I’m not going to raise any such issues, but give humble and hearty thanks that this is so.
Dear JMG:
Thank you for that. Do you know of a good book by Vico that covers this thought? I find a lot of books about his philosophy, but I have no idea how true to his actual work they are.
Also, do you consider the “left’s” ideology and “thought processes “ if you will, are Marxist? I see some common ground (both ideas of history and the future are Christianity with the serial numbers filed off, for example), but do you think it is just something like common evolution or a more conscious starting point or theory?
Finally, Tim Watkins at Consciousness of Sheep has a very interesting post today, covering the political left, right, and the guy with the funny mustache among other things.
And thank you for this forum; a place of calm and sanity!
Cugel
“A commenter on a liberal blog responded to the election results and particularly the educational levels of Trump’s voters by asking “Can you show us on the doll exactly where the educated professionals hurt you?” ”
What a funny way to start the week’s topic. The sheer arrogance is astonishing. This Trump voter has a doctorate in metallurgical engineering ( as well as the MS and BS) and a second BS in chemistry. The commenter can’t conceive that an educated person might not be a left-wing control junky. Liberal-arts majors trying to tell me how to run my life or what I should do tend to annoy me. Even more so when they are from the big city and hove no idea how to function in a rural setting.
As to where the hurt was, the wallet. I could show the commenter the official wage history from Social Security that delineates my own personal ‘lost decade’ from 1995 to 2004 in nominal terms, or 2006 if we take inflation into account. Why did that happen? Mining was pronounced industry non-grata. Why? So the urban PMC could have high quality low cost vacations. They also went after logging at the same time.
On a different topic, about a year ago a crew plowed in three plastic conduits along the road. They were for some fiber-optic purpose, but the local fiberoptic lines are on the overhead power poles. The people plowing in the conduits did not know who was going to use them or for what.
Last Monday there was a guy sorting cables out of one of the junction boxes. He did know. The new lines are for a main trunk between Quincy, WA and Cheyenne WY. I asked why the line was not going along the Interstate highway and he said it was too hard to get permits, the highway people don’t want anything interfering with their right-of-way. But this local county road is no problem. Quincy has several server farms and is getting more. Cheyenne is on the way to Denver and points East. The AI and general data transfer boom is continuing.
As for allowing the jews in mass to the US? The four jews I knew personally were decent folks. One decided Jesus was the messiah after all and converted to Methodist (the Catholics were also wrong) but I’d really like a formal renunciation of Leviticus 25 – 44 -46 – “44 Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. 45 You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. 46 You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.”
I’m not keen on letting some group who claims a unilateral right to enslave me into the country. Netanyahu didn’t help when he invoked 1-Samuel 15-3, “Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”
Since my dataset is all of four counting the one who renounced the religion, I am admittedly, and perhaps unfairly suspicious. How many still actually believe this? How many are willing to act on it? Do the later books of the Talmud have a “that was history, don’t even think about it” clause? If so, then why are some members of the Israeli government going on about Greater Israel?” As I said, religion baffles me. In gravity I trust, the MOND and dark matter debate notwithstanding.
This is probably a question better suited for Magic Monday, but it is often said that those who decide to walk the path of occultism are subject to two forces: the first being known as the Guardian of the Threshold, trying to dissuade them from going forward, and the second one, that I don’t know the specific name of, disciplining those who try to walk off the path and revert to their past selves. Is there a good resource on those two and their potential interplay?
@earthworm
It’s probably a cameraman with a camera on a tripod (you can see the legs on the second photo) filming the crowd, the fuzzy bit on the left being a microphone, and the white “tentacle” bit being a glare on a viewfinder.
FYI – DEI fail findings:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/nyt-bloomberg-bury-rutgers-study-showing-dei-makes-people-hostile
Link to the actual study:
https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/Instructing-Animosity_11.13.24.pdf
“A meta-analysis by Paluck et al. (2021) found that too few studies in the field have investigated real-world
impact on “light-touch” interventions or seminars and training programs.4 Taken together, the limited
evidence suggests that some DEI programs not only fail to achieve their goals but can actively undermine
diversity efforts. Specifically, mandatory trainings that focus on particular target groups can foster
discomfort and perceptions of unfairness5 (Burnett and Aguinis, 2024). DEI initiatives seen as affirmative
action rather than business strategy can provoke backlash,6 increasing rather than reducing racial
resentment7 (Kidder et al., 2004; Legault et al. (2001). And diversity initiatives aimed at managing bias can
fail, sometimes resulting in decreased representation and triggering negativity among employees8 (Leslie,
2019; Kalev, Dobbin, & Kelly, 2006). In other words, some DEI programs appear to backfire.”
The Harris campaign and war in Ukraine are beginning to resemble each other ( though one is far more tragic and dangerous). Both had/have unlikeable leadership, with Ukraine’s even worse than the recent Dem’s recent standard bearer. If Tom Clancy wrote one of his books with one geopolitical actor consisting of an out of work comedian fronting for a bunch of Nazi’s it would be rejected by his editor.
Both face/faced a quick on its feet opponent that is/was able to counter each feeble blow with a knockout punch.
Like the Harris Campaign the Ukraine is burning through. money with little to show for it, and more than a whiff of corruption and insider dealing.
Both were/are delusional as to their chances of victory, claiming almost certain victory right up to the end.
And no surprise, they were/are both backed by the same people.
Re: access to academic articles – if the author is still alive and working in academia, it’s usually pretty easy to find an email address for them. I have had surprisingly good success with simply emailing the author, explaining why I’m interested in their research and asking them to send me a copy. Usually they’re thrilled to learn that anybody cares.
A few days ago I was at a burger place half a mile from my house and they were playing Christmas music, stuff like Mariah Carey and “If I had a hippopotamus for Christmas”. The entire place was also already decked out with wreaths and a tinfoil Christmas tree and red and white ribbons and signs proclaiming “Merry Christmas”.
John based on your recent writings, do you get the feeling that Sara would be looking down on you going “John you didn’t have to wait for me to leave to start writing about Wagner!” 😛
@Ahnaf, it is really odd. For many years there are people that are aware of the resource issues end up falling head of heals for things like asteroid mining as a solution. The bargaining phase in full swing. Next comes depression and acceptance but I am not sure many will ever get there.
@ JMG in response to Ahnaf “it’s not accidental that European cultures are the only people anywhere to have invented linear perspective for their art”
This has been one of the most fascinating ideas. There are some Roman pieces that come close to the vanishing point stuff but not to the same degree as later European works. It isn’t explicit with a defined vanishing point but heavily hinted at, but then of course the Romans would have a similar ideal to that of later Europeans. They figured the empire would go on forever!
In the art space there is always talk about Compassionate and Naive works. Compassionate being a realistic representation of the world, Johannes Vermeer is a great example of this. Naive works are more like that of a child, they just want to get it into the regardless of how accurate it is. Unfortunately it did lead to a lot of what is considered modern abstract art. Folks Like Salvador Dali do a reasonable job of melding the two by having naive intents with compassionate skills.
But there are many works, particularly from Chinese cultures that use a lot of isometric perspective for architecture and anything that would have a more compassionate representation of the world is usually so focused on nature that there is no need for the vanishing point.
A good example of this is the gorgeous work “Zhen Shang Zhai” by Wen Zhengming (1557) – https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-studio-of-true-appreciation-zhen-shang-zhai/0wHlzouEuN5W5A?hl=en
Isometric lines for the man made, nature follows its own rules and style. A mix of compassionate and naive in a most wonderful way.
JMG wrote:
“Batstrel, first of all, keep in mind that if we all reincarnate, nobody can do you any permanent harm at all. Sure, they can kill you, but that just means you shed one body, take a breather on the inner planes, and get a new body in due time.”
But Stanislav Grof and others maintain that nasty experiences in one life can cause phobias in the next. Nor do I want a new body. Keep on getting new lives? It all sounds a bit too much like consumerism to me. NOT reincarnating strikes me as a much GREENER option.
“Second, you can’t get safely through one life — no matter what happens, after all, you’re going to die someday — so it seems pointless to worry about it.”
I never worry about dying, so long as it’s a non-violent death and also that I don’t get put on the grim Liverpool Pathway in some hospital. A non-violent death is supposed to be a blissful experience. A peaceful death would mean that I’ve reached my destination, and safely. Sorted!
“Finally, you can take action here and now to improve your next life, by living an ethical life and engaging in some form of spiritual practice.” Well, I do try to live ethically. “develop a certain level of reflective self-awareness” – I believe I do that too. Karma? Not sure how much I believe in it. Too much would negate free will. Do all the conscripted Ukrainians and Russians who die horribly in their war deserve it? I suspect not.
If I do end up on the Other Side again after death, I’ll just have to organise a protest. “Stop reincarnation NOW! Sue Mr. God for every penny he’s got!” 😉
On last week’s post, I made a post and, unfortunately, was trying to be concise about what I wanted to say, and I think too concise and obtuse and so here, I’ll try again:
For those who don’t know Thomas Sowell “A Conflict of Visions” he says people fall into one of two very broad categories, those who tend to have a constrained view of humanity and those with an unconstrained view. To quote K. Kissin who summarized Sowell, “Those with the unconstrained vision think that humans are malleable and can be perfected. They believe that social ills and evils can be overcome through collective action that encourages humans to behave better. To subscribers of this view poverty, crime, inequality, and war are not inevitable, rather, they are puzzles that can be solved. We only need to say the right things, enact the right policies, and spend enough money and we will suffer these social ills no more. This worldview is the foundation of the progressive mindset.
By contrast, those who see the world through a constrained vision lens believe that human nature is a universal constant. No manner of social engineering can change the sober reality of human self-interest, or the fact that human empathy and social resources are necessarily limited and scarce. People who see things this way believe that most political and social problems will never be solved, they can only be managed. This approach is the bedrock of the conservative worldview.”
Basically, the unconstrained viewpoint has see people as basically good, that cultural differences are superficial, that people change easily if you just present the right argument or show them the right way. Thus borders don’t matter, all injustices can be rectified, and everyone can achieve anything they want and the only reason they can’t is because of bad people holding them back.
The first point I wanted to make is that for the past 30 years, those with the unconstrained vision have so completely dominated academia, that everyone who graduated with a degree since the 1980s has been exposed to that one single-sided view and one single attitude and one single set of ideas about the world which are held to be unquestionable, and therefore largely unquestioned. That is all of the Clerisy who run government and major corporations, hence many of the policies and attitudes broadly adopted across society (policies which are manifestly failing), and the sneering tone of educated people towards non-educated, who are, to judge from the recent election results, largely of a constrained vision mindset, which is much more common around most of the world.
The second book I referenced is “Lila” by Robert Persig, where it explores, among other things, the idea that culture changes must have time to become solid and tested and modified to meet real needs. Change is inevitable, if for no other reason that physical world circumstances change. A successful culture adapts to change and changes to adapt, but only as needed. If there are too many changes, too fast, they don’t take they become fugitive and any culture that changes too much dissolves. A culture that does not change, that refuses to change becomes brittle and easily broken.
Right now we are in a time when changes are being pushed on us fast and furiously, particularly from the Clerisy who want to achieve perfection now. Anything currently deemed to interfere with the perfection of society must be changed, without any regard for its suitability or whether the new condition is even sane. This has had a huge impact on a great many people who have essentially, thrown up their hands and said, “Fine, I can’t keep up. If I’m doomed to forever be a Bad Person because I’m racist, sexist, homophobic… whatever, then if I have to do the time, I might as well do the crime, right?” And thus we see a notable shift into attitudes deemed utterly unacceptable by the Clerisy being adopted wholeheartedly by a huge majority of the populace, if for no other reason than it annoys their soi-disant betters.
And hence the turmoil in the political and social realm: those in the upper classes changing the rules about what is acceptable so frequently no one can keep track, even if those social rules made sense, which most don’t, but no one has time to even slow down to check. Those who are not in the upper classes are voting for a collection of agendas from people who range from making sense to spouting utter nonsense, but all of whom are drawn together simply by the common theme that they oppose the Clerisy and their failing policies.
I yearn for politicians who are not on the extremes, who would, in the words of Disraeli, change what needs to change, but only as much as needed. Stability, reliability, rule of law, institutions that are worth respecting.
John, thank you for your recommendations. I’ve already been looking at the groups you mentioned, so it appears I’m on the right track. All the best to you brother.
Robert Gibson @ 8, I share your disappointment with Dos Passos. I have tried to read several of his novels, and could not make myself finish them after a few chapters. It appears to me, on what is admittedly a superficial acquaintance, that Dos Passos was one of those writers who, while they can describe a scene, can’t tell a good story.
Clay Dennis @ 12, in the 1970s, people who had survived the Depression and WWII were still alive. Cutting back when times were hard was what you did. The present refusal to adopt sensible lifestyle changes is, I submit, a toxic mix of entitlement, anger (why me?) not to mention sociopathic determination to Have Mine, among other discreditable emotions and opinions. I don’t pretend to have a complete understanding, but I have seen the same phenomena. Don’t forget the importance of mass culture indoctrination in persuadeing people to shop till they drop.
@Princess Cutekitten:
What if he is from Tlon or Uqbar and not Qatar at all?
Earthworm #1. That is an officer in the imperial Saudaukar.
Will O
@earthworm, #1
I found a photo from a different angle. The weird creature on top is a camera operator!
https://ibb.co/WvcTctn
So, nothing supernatural. How our imagination plays tricks on us sometimes!
@Andy T
The bait problem I guess we will adapt to collectively recognize soon enough. Yeah, Recognition of divisions between those impacted and the people who control use in the coming generation is gonna take one shape or another. I have heard terms like ‘ipad kid’ being thrown around. Yes adults are into the same mess just we arent going through it in our developing stages. Out with leaded gasoline fumes and in with hyperstimulation. I had fun in some rather wild bar scenes and bush parties in the old days and feel bad they are gonna miss out!
JMG
Thank you for your reply to my comment on the most recent Magic Monday.
I have a question about American politics for you and the wider audience. This most recent election cycle I was out of America and may have missed it but from what I could tell the Democratic party and their media allies didn’t even attempt to mobilize BLM/Antifa types into the streets. They had done this pretty much like clockwork during election season since 2012. What changed? Why was no attempt made to stoke fires about ethnic tensions and use the usual media flacks to encourage rioting? It’s the one big question mark hanging over the 2024 election for me.
Best,
JZ
Michael Martin 31
> I think this may be an 85-year-old idea whose time has finally come.
My immediate reaction is, “Are you nuts?” No way. I am a non-Jaw. I think that non-Jawish (‘goys’) Americans would never allow it. Personally, I would be dead-set against it. There isn’t any other issue to which I would be more violently opposed. Someone asking such a question is incredibly unschooled.
Jaws, Jawish Isrulees, and Isrulees are far from innocent.
Enough said. (I would rather not get in trouble with JMG, or get scalped by Mosstard.)
No-one wants to know how I could possibly say such, what probably many would label as, a ‘deplorable‘ thing. Fine. I shan’t divulge. The information is out there, if one is open-minded enough to look, do one’s own research, and puts two-and-two together in one’s own mind. Jawish history is written by Jaws, about Jaws, so of course, Jaws write only glowing praise. One won’t find true words unless one is willing to dig deeply and upset the apple cart. Look under the hood dispassionately…
💨Northwind Grandma💨❌🚫🙅🏼♀️👎🏼😵☠️
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
JMG: #40 re: BLM and Antifa — They’ve only been active, historically, prior to an election, and I think we all figured them out in 2019/2020. In 2024, they were in a bind: they couldn’t protest the current (Democratic) administration they’d fought so hard to install, and by the time Trump won the election, it was too late for them to do anything about it. Also, their (public) leadership co-opted themselves by making off with the money. They got Theirs; why go back to another fight?
I think the polarization of our society has been vastly exaggerated by social media performers looking to stoke the drama for attention. Talking to my local politicians, we’re worried about putting new lights over the sports field, not national issues.
Andy T., I also loved Harriet the Spy when I was a kid. More generally, I preferred kids’ books with complex, messed-up central characters, not least because at that time I was complex and messed-up, and knew it; reading stories that featured kids like me reassured me that there could be a place for me in the world. You’ll be pleased to know that the fourth Ariel Moravec novel is already in the publisher’s hands, the fifth is in process, and the sixth and seventh are in outline-plus-scraps-of-text form right now. I’m having immense fun with the series.
Eagle Fang, excellent. I bow in your direction.
Cugel, Vico’s been almost completely abandoned by modern academe. You might be able to find a thoughtful book titled Vico’s Axioms by James Robert Goetsch Jr.; it’s a decent introduction. Other than that, there’s only Vico’s own work The New Science, which is incredibly difficult for modern readers. I probably need to do a book club on it one of these days. As for modern liberalism and Marxism, they’re cousins, nohing closer than that. Both take their starting point from the delusion that intellectuals ought to run society and manipulate the poor into giving them power; both, as you’ve noted, have a theory of history that’s Christian myth with the serial numbers filed off; but Marxism has a vast amount of dysfunctional theory dragging it down, while liberalism simply has the raw craving for power. Thanks for the heads up about Tim’s latest — I’ll go have a look.
Brent, hmm! That’s a new one to me. If you find a source I’d be interested in hearing about it.
Nicky, delighted to see this irruption of common sense into the oxygen-deprived world of modern social manipulation. Thank you.
Clay, I wonder if the Harris campaign will turn out to be as riddled with graft as Ukraine…
Michael, Sara was as thoroughgoing a Wagner fan as I am, and the two of us discussed all these points in conversations. She urged me several times to write a book on my take on Wagner. As for perspective, Chinese art is distinguished by its use of atmospheric perspective — indicating distance by the fading effects of the atmosphere on distant things. Leonardo da Vinci introduced that into Western art many centuries after the Chinese, and I’ve wondered for years if he might have seen some Chinese painting carried west over the Silk Route and been inspired by it. In the hands of the great Chinese artists it produced landscapes of stunning beauty.
Batstrel, ah, but it’s hardly green to make souls a disposable, one-use-only commodity! 😉 The more important issue is that the nature of the afterlife is hardly up to us to decide. I don’t believe in reincarnation because it makes me feel good; I believe in it because countless people down through the ages have remembered their previous lives, and so do I. The universe is under no obligation to cater to our whims, after all!
Renaissance, thanks for this. As I noted when you first posted it, Sowell is one of the great intellects of our time. He’s right about these two viewpoints and their consequences. An inability to accept limits is one of the major symptoms of insanity.
Bro. Ashlar, you’re most welcome.
John, that’s one of the oddest things about this whole election cycle. I think that part of the cause is that local and state law enforcement started going after the lawyers and other upper-level people who were running, financing, and bailing out the Antifa and BLM stormtroopers; once it wasn’t just the cannon fodder who faced prison time, the whole network seems to have fallen apart.
Lathechuck, if that spirit returns to national politics, I’ll be very happy indeed.
Neon Vincent #2
Regarding where the educated professionals hurt me. I went through a divorce some years ago and I am not going to give any specifics but educated professionals, lawyers, mediators, counselors. All people who before this I thought would help out almost destroyed me. If it wasn’t for my birth family I might not have survived.
@Shane: yeah, been there. It induces nausea after a while.
For people who *don’t* react that way, though… it is insanely destructive. All of our real thinking, reflecting, grappling with ideas, wrestling with problems, analyzing the situations we find ourselves in… ALL of that stuff happens with quiet, with boredom, with uninterrupted, unfilled time.
With a device in your hand all the time, and a permanent connection to the internet, that needn’t ever happen. There is no reflection, no analysis, no comparing this year to last year, no struggle, no boredom, no original thought, no connecting to the divine. There is only the next thing, replacing the last thing, perpetually. It is soul-death by ten-second increments.
JMG, what you typed about local law enforcement “going after the lawyers and other upper-level people who were running, financing, and bailing out the Antifa and BLM stormtroopers” is a welcome development indeed. Do have any links, or can you cite any examples?
Michael Martin @ 31, foundation of the state of Israel was a project of the dying British Empire, who needed a way station at the end of the Suez Canal. I fail to understand why it is the responsibility of us Americans to rescue Israelis from the consequences of their own crimes and intransigent folly. Any of us dumb, clueless Americans can tell you that if you move into a tough neighborhood, you need to get along with your neighbors. Which includes MYOB and make yourself useful when and as you can.
I suppose you, like others who post here, don’t appreciate the pose of moral superiority which our PMC so often adopts; one could almost think that belief in their superior righeousness is a mass delusion among Israelis. Furthermore, I assert that we Americans have no duty to protect members of the Israeli govt. and military from possible arrest and prosecution for war crimes.
Do you think the odds of nuclear war have changed now that supposedly US missiles have been lobbed from Ukraine into Russia? From what I understand, this has crossed one of Putin’s red lines that he said could lead to the use of nuclear weapons. On the other hand, I judge him to be savvy enough to just wait it out until Trump gets into office.
Hello JMG,
Excited for those prereleases, as I’m working my way through both those series!
Right now I’m reading through the Cosmic Doctrine along with your commentary. You mention in your commentary the following practice: “Take any habit of passion, imagination, or thinking that is automatic, mindless, and destructive—these are the classic markers of demonic influence—and meditate on it until you can pick it apart into its two component forces, which alternate in your psyche. Then you pit the two component forces against each other until they lock into a stable vortex, and their ability to influence you is reduced to the square root of its previous potency. The two forces will differ from person to person—one person may balance anger with shame, another may balance anger with fear, or what have you—but by figuring out the balance and bringing the two forces into contact, degradation happens; a demon is bound.”
I have been meditating on and attempting this, but haven’t had a breakthrough yet. The astral forces that I have identified when brought into contact seem to reconstitute the passion that I am trying to resolve. (In this instance, anxiety about the prospects for my small business.)
Are there any tips you can share for how to create the right balance of the forces?
FWIW I’ve been meditating lately on the phrase “the direction is not the path”. It has lots of applications, including climate change, politics, learning, etc. Hope someone finds it of value.
@ JMG “Sara was as thoroughgoing a Wagner fan as I am, and the two of us discussed all these points in conversations. She urged me several times to write a book on my take on Wagner. ”
I’m not surprised at all to hear that. Maybe once you are done with the series here, it could be like some of your other books that came out of the weekly/monthly posts.
Book might end up being the ‘King in Orange’ of the classical music world.
@JMG, others.
Some links that may be of interest: Scott Alexander reviews Rodney Stark’s “The Rise of Christianity.”
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-rise-of-christianity
Since I haven’t read the book myself, I can’t say how well the reviewer covers its core arguments. But he makes it sound fascinating. People who are interested in the rise of a new religious sensibility in our day – which I think includes most Ecosophians – would probably do well to look at the history of how it happened the last time around.
Doug Metzger’s “Literature and History” podcast is also a good source on this – especially the huge number of different religious and philosophical strands – Jewish, Zoroastrian, Platonic, Gnostic, other salvation cults like Isis worship – that got woven together to make the Christianity that emerged from the fall of Rome. Though one does have to be willing to sit through some 200 hours of podcasts.
Amd here is a detailed (and ebullient) review of C. S. Lewis’ “Space Trilogy” by Twilight Patriot.
https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/book-review-c-s-lewis-space-trilogy
I know that our host has praised this series before, especially That Hideous Strength. So people who haven’t read it yet might be interested in finding out what it’s all about. (Unlike the Stark book, I have read this trilogy myself and can strongly recommend it).
A scientist made his own population projection model which shows global population peaking in 2040 and declining to 4 billion by 2100. There has been a lot of talk about population contraction recently, especially after Elon Musk brought it up in that Joe Rogan interview. I think it’s starting to dawn on the general public that limitless growth is not going to happen.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/06/peak-population-projections/
Batstrel,
Reincarnation is the only purpose why we are here, in this reality. We cycle through many lives , bodies and experiences to learn and also to allow the eternal creator to experience his creation. You are immortal. Your consciousness is temporarily attached to a nervous system that makes the mortal experience very believable.
Many cultures tried to escape the reincarnation cycle. Some believe the Mayans were successful in that. Some believe Egyptians found a way not to directly escape reincarnation but to escape death by detaching consciousness from the mortal body hence living forever.
There is some evidence via the stories of the many NDE ( near death experience) that we come back voluntarily and even choose the life circumstances and other souls ahead of time.
People describe how their entire life flashes in front of them in seconds ( download), then the memory is wiped and your soul jacked into another life/avatar.
Concurrently to this, most of us do notice how difficult this reality is set up. There seems to be a predetermined drivel in that favors hardship, inequality, violence and suffering. We define it as ‘nature’. Again, many ancient cultures and most current American native cultures for example believe that there are bad players that entered what supposed to be human souls realm and distorted it to violence.
I recommend Archaix.com and also Chief Iron Bush ( he’s on YouTube) if you want more information how to process your current life and prepare for the next reincarnation.
Well, I probably worded my question poorly. The Guardian of the Threshold is fairly well known phenomena, so I assume the problem is with how I described the other one. A few weeks ago a student of Celtic Golden Dawn shared on Magic Monday his experience of abandoning their studies due to relapse into a bad habit, and had a period of misfortune that didn’t end until they pulled themselves together, and you replied that this “once you start on a spiritual path that includes esoteric practice, the universe will very gladly whack you upside the head with a clue-by-four if you need it”, so my assumption was this is also a well known phenomena.
As for potential interplay between the two, Robert Anton Wilson (if I’m not mistaken), Antero Alli and a few other authors wrote about the “Chapel Perilous”, a point in occult journey where one is reluctant to go forward for one reason or another, but not-so-gently prodded should they try to go back, and how being stuck there can lead to paranoid delusions. This experience feels somewhat relatable to me, but their writing often seems like an in-joke that I’m not on, probably due to me coming from a different culture and not being a native English speaker. Thus, I made another assumption, that perhaps someone else wrote about it in a more Greyface-friendly manner.
I hope this clarifies things, and I apologize if I’m wasting your time.
Thomas Sowell also has some interesting views on conquest and empire. I recommend his book _Conquests and Cultures_.
Rita
I am totally delighted to hear that about the Ariel Moravec books!
Maybe some others here can relate – I have a very difficult time getting into most fiction. I’ve always had a low appetite for it, although there are a few series I enjoy. I struggle with entertainment in general; it makes me feel like I’m wasting my life even though I know I need breaks and to stretch my mind. Teaching novels seem to be a good genre for me.
More and more, the real world seems stranger, more nuanced, and alive to me lately. More beautiful and meaningful, even with the crust of decay. Meanwhile I feel like more people around me are checked out into virtual worlds, either games or social media as Ian and Shane mentioned above. I feel a bit crazy at times for not craving them more. In reality, I realize feel abandoned by people I used to respect. But in the spirit of the broader conversation, I imagine many other former progressives feel that way.
@Brenainn Griffudd #45: I think The Changer is Old Man Coyote.
I wrote an essay called Why Trump Won (And how to bring something that rhymes to your country)
https://open.substack.com/pub/kimberlysteele/p/why-trump-won
Happy Thanksgiving!
Mr. JMG & Commentariat,
Nice to talk to you all again. I have been living in rhythm with my life again. It is a nice feeling.
I have a question about practicing magic. Recently, it was my birthday, and I found myself journaling for the first time in a few weeks. I was coming out of a very chaotic time in my life- a time where I was temporarily homeless, living at a relative’s house. I had just moved into my new apartment, and I was up late in my bed writing. For whatever reason, I ended up writing a sentence of positive affirmation for every year of my life that I had lived. I numbered each of my sentences from 1 to my current age. I didn’t think too much about what I was writing in the moment, only that I needed to finish the task. I ended the journal entry and went to bed without thinking too much of the entry.
The next morning, I woke up in an unusually good mood. I went to work as usual, and I began to notice strange things happening to me. I seemed to have incredible luck throughout my day. Normally, I do not receive much help at work, but on this day all of my coworkers were going out of their way to help me out. This was an unusual occurrence, to say the least. I also noticed that there were pretty woman flirting with me. There was another moment when I went into a coffee shop with a friend and we ended up getting free pastries. Altogether, I had about three or four days of incredibly good luck. Now I am not unfamiliar to good luck, but I have not had a run of luck like this ever before. It seemed like everything was going my way.
Eventually this run of good luck wore off, but I couldn’t shake the thought that I might’ve accidentally cast some sort of magical spell while I was writing my journal entry. I talked to a friend about this, and she said that I ‘manifested’ this run of good luck. I am not really sure what to make of this, and I wonder if anyone in this community can help shed light on whether there was some rough magic being practiced in my journal entry.
I guess:
– was this some form of magic?
– is ‘manifesting’ a colloquialism for magic?
– If there was some magic here, how do I learn more about this thing?
Thanks all!
One thing I do hope to be true about reincarnation is that at some point between or after my incarnations, I can revisit my various lives — if only in a kind of virtual form — and get some kind of satisfying closure for the characters that I’ve played throughout the millennia. (Of course it’s possible that once I wake to my true self, I’ll no longer care about such things, but this little self would like to believe it’s not so disposable as that!)
(It occurs to me that it would be rather fun if an author capped off his or her career by writing a books with the final epilogues for each of the main protagonists of his or her works, or perhaps a shared one where they meet and come to terms with having only a borrowed existence. I admit I find it hard to imagine the circumstances in which an author would write such a book!)
Rather than bringing the Israeli population en masse to the US, there is actually a Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Autonomous_Oblast
It is right next to China. IMO it is a far better solution, the Israelis won’t be persecuted by anyone, far away from the contested grounds of the middle east.
I doubt it’s going to happen but if we are talking about wild schemes, this allows Israelis to maintain their own culture and live among their own people peacefully.
Hey JMG and Michael Gray
I also have mixed feelings about the whole thing, especially as our government has been trying to introduce “Anti-misinformation” laws which would make it easier for them to silence free speech. Luckily their efforts have been blocked in parliament.
On the other hand, I do feel a perverse sense of glee in thinking of all those parents of “Ipad Kids” who will have to deal with the fact that it will be a bit harder to simply let their kids rot in front of a screen, instead of ensuring they have a social life and parenting them in general.
Also, For anyone who wants to learn more about the possible social-media ban, here is a link.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/nov/21/labor-social-media-ban-under-16s-details-what-is-covered-which-platform
# 31 Michael Martin
#67 Northwind Grandma
I heard that a lot of them have dual citizenship with the USA already, and a lot of them also have dual citizenship with Russia.
I will say this:
We had a chance to save many people after WW2 by giving the soviet POWs amnesty, but instead handed them right back over to Stalin, to appease the dictator. That IMO was the most satanistic and sadistic thing we have ever done, or more correctly we chose not to do something good for others and take the risk on them.
Those people were the regular Russians/Slavs who apparently did not matter to either the soviet union or the USA/Western powers on any humanistic terms. And yet when the country “I” and it’s settlers, many who have dual citizenships, asks us to jump, we all go to attention and ask “How high?”
So we are supposed to hate Russians, but love people who have dual citizenship with Russia? Cognitive dissidence anyone?
Amazing, truly amazing. I guess the propaganda and brainwashing really did work on the general populace.
Thank you for your answer, John. I’ll be reading Bardis book with skepticism. Now I’m reading the part in which he quotes Orlov, who is another fast collapse friend…
Dear JMG,
let me also offer my condolences!
Robert
Hey again JMG
I thought I would also share my latest book review, for a compilation of short stories inspired by the I Ching.
It is a very nice compilation, that would definitely be a good Xmas gift for anyone interested in the I Ching, or Chinese culture in general.
https://jlmc12.substack.com/p/64-chance-pieces-by-will-buckingham?r=e0m1f
Ecosophian #25
“Clearly, it’s one of the tentacle-faced priests of Cthulhu that the Russian clergy summoned to their aid. He’s overseeing the ceremony.”
Now there I was thinking it might be General Zod! 😉
JMG #40 & Northwind #41
Yeah – the screenshot I took was too low res (I was more interested in the star on the doors) and could not find the original again.
Brent #52
That would work, and the ‘white “tentacle”‘ keeps Ecosophian’s Cthulhu option open.
Will O #63
“That is an officer in the imperial Saudaukar.”
I was leaning towards a Fremen stillsuit, but yeah.
Ecosophian #64
Thank you! The image is even called ‘thats a cameraman.jpg’!
Zooming in though, it still has a sci-fi feel:
https://imgur.com/a/qCIEiKm
…and to follow a thread of imagination, if I had a picture of a spetsnaz operative carrying a Psychomorphic Field Analyser and Knife Missile launcher, I’d call it ‘thats a cameraman’ as well 😉
What do you think of the idea that Trump’s reelection has a lot to do with the complete absence of a Workers’ Party in the US? With essentially only two Bourgeois Parties dominating, each representing the interests of Capital, the working class had little choice when rejecting the current crop of clueless elites who failed to offer them anything whatsoever. Problem is, Trump doesn’t care about their interests either.
Batstrel, if you are that worried about reincarnation, then Theravada Buddhism is the religion for you. The problem the Buddha wanted to solve is essentially involuntary rebirth, and his path is supposed to lead you there, at least in Theravada.
#6 Industrial Alchemy,
I’m an accounting academic at the equivalent of a small community college in Europe. To answer your question succinctly, the easiest way for the general public to access academic research is via a website like Sci-Hub (best to search for it, as it shifts domains ever so often).
The majority of academic research is pay-walled by publishers that require institutional subscription to databases, which is grifting (and using our host’s terminology, lenocracy) of the highest order. Although efforts have been made to push for open access, the world of academia is very conservative and generally has resisted efforts to change the status quo due to indirect financial incentives and the prestige ladder. There is a long essay that could be written about this, but I will leave that for some other time and place. For small colleges like mine that can’t afford the outrageous subscription fees charged, Sci-Hub is the equivalent of getting your friends at richer institutions to download and email you a copy of what you’re after via their institutional access.
That being said, every academic that I know will email you a copy of any paper they’ve written if you email them, so if you can’t find the paper in Sci-Hub or its equivalent, emailing them will do the trick. We have no incentives in general to gatekeep our research, as the more it gets out there, the better the test by the public, and most honest academics still dream of doing useful work rather than to take the Faustian bargain of selling their ethics and morals to publish cargo cult nonsense for the sake of advancing their careers.
balowulf @ #9: unless there’s something egregiously evil about the place or it needs cleansed for some higher purpose it might be worth renting it out to discerning customers
https://www.timeout.com/usa/travel/haunted-airbnbs-in-usa
Bad times for Woke Inquisition: Anti-woke reaction is happening in my country too. Even part of the leftism is sick and tired of wokesters nonsense. Never is too late…
Today, for example, I’ve been informed that a new socialist party is born in my country. Its name; “Soberanía y Trabajo” (Sovereignty and Work). They self-define themselves as not woke leftists. Well, they also are outside the Ukrainian war NATO&EU narrative, like Sahra Wagenknecht party in Germany; for this reason the MSM are going to ignore them at least first…then if they have more supporters, they would be demonized surely as commies, fascists, or maybe both thoughtstoppers.
I don’t have to subscribe every point in his political program, but I think it’s a good sign in the ‘de-wokization’ of my country sociopolitical groups.
For #6 Industrial Alchemy – re how to access academic papers. I saw JMG’s response, and that’s never what I use. I always start with Google Scholar. Click the upper left to open the menu. Then click Advanced Search. Once there, it’s pretty straightforward. Eventually you will stumble onto inputting the best keywords; I always then start with title and usually nothing comes up and then “anywhere in the article.” Absolutely crucial is what you do when a list does come up for you. If something looks interesting there, always click on the last phrase, something like “All 7 versions”. Then you can look for the pdf outside of the journal gates, often PSU.edu but sometimes other countries the academics post their own papers. I am on Researchgate, so if the former doesn’t work, I can message one of the coauthors and ask for a copy (which they can send me but cannot post if it is in a top journal usually). Also, if you do enough wikipedia editing each month, you get access to the Wiki-library, https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/?next_url=/users/my_library/. Maybe once or twice it has helped me. But usually the Google Scholar insider approach does a fabulous job of getting past the paywalls.
JZ,
My tentative read is that Democrats were worried, with all the Israel/Palestine stuff already dividing their party, that riots in the streets before the election would result in too much mud sticking to the Democrats themselves (there was some talk of this before the DNC). And after the election, there was no point—the Republican victory was decisive, and Trump can’t run again, so there’s not much to be gained by further stoking hysteria about him. It all felt like an anticlimax to me, like all the Democrats’ emotion and momentum had been spent by election time. Even the post-election wailing has seemed muted.
Hi JMG (and everyone else!),
A quick comment/question for anyone who cares to respond. I grew in a place where it was common to see the stars at night, but since moving to Canada (I have lived in several cities in Southern Ontario, and all were the same in this regard), there have been no visible stars at night. Within the last year or so I have started to see them again. Not tons of them, but a few, and it seems more all the time – recently I would say this has become the norm. I would assume this is due to less light pollution at night, and I wondered if this was a bit of a sign of decline, that there are just less lights left running all night due to expense, street lights are being run dimmer (etc).
I was curious if others in urban areas were seeing the same thing, and if they did, what they made of it.
Also, I wanted to offer my condolences for the passing of your father, and I hope you are well.
Thanks,
Johnny
I’m slowly working my way through your old posts. Yesterday I read “Hate is the New Sex” from August 2, 2017. I have the habit of blurting out “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.” while I’m washing the dishes, brushing my teeth, or while driving home from work. I usually follow it up with: “Who am I talking to, and why is it always hate?”
I’m looking forward to The Carnelian Moon. I’ve already finished “The Witch of Criswell” and “The Book of Haatan” is in my pile of breakfast reads.
@Patricia Mathews #83
You could be right. I try to avoid being too attached to any of my bits of speculation. Whoever the Changer is in North America, I think he’s gonna play an increasingly important role in the next several centuries. I suspect that his name and identity will become much clearer as change accelerates, and maybe we’ll have a clearer idea during our own lifetimes.
Thank you, Anne and Alvin, for your recommendations re. reincarnation. I shall investigate.
The younger me would have been appalled that I could even consider taking reincarnation seriously.
Faustian painting translates into social progress along a straight line, whereas I dont see social causes and connections as progress, but rather as a spiral web of relationships and interconnection. Movement on one end causes vibrations on another. Not one line but many in a spiral weave. How do we strengthen that weave when forces are causing it to unravel and fray? That is one of my positions / questions.
Re: social media ban:
This is a hard one. I don’t buy the idea that the rights and freedoms of adults should be infringed upon because some people don’t take responsibility for their children. On the other hand, it’s truly a tragedy and a sin what screens and social media are doing to children, and it’s happening to the majority of children, not just a few. The effects on society are massive, and the effects on the children are devastating and probably irreversible in many cases. Most parents are apparently unwilling, unable, or unaware. Moreover, many institutions virtually mandate screens for kids: public schools issuing tablets for homework, organizational activities for groups, clubs, and teams occurring via group texts and social media, many pediatricians and other professionals now require online forms and mobile check in, etc. You have to really fight to control access in that environment, and it comes with real tradeoffs.
J.L.Mc12 mentions the obnoxiousness of iPad parents, and I fully agree, but I also see that it’s not easy out there right now. Public schools are a travesty, childcare is hideously expensive, and working class jobs rarely pay enough to allow a parent to stay home with the kids. This leads to frazzled parents with poor relationships to their kids, so even when they are with them, they have a much harder time engaging and disciplining their kids, and kids with terrible habits being fostered outside the home which the parents must then fight. The people I know who are screen-free with their kids are mostly PMC with nannies and/or remote jobs, or Evangelical Christians who homeschool with a SAHM.
(Lest I be said to just be making defensive excuses, I will note that our daughter does not have access to any screens, but I also recognize that this is at least as attributable to our favorable circumstances as it is to our virtue as parents).
Ultimately I think I oppose the restrictions, but I really worry about allowing things to continue as they have been.
JMG, I think there are a couple of other reasons for the post election ” fizzle” of the Antifa and BLM brownshirts.
Since the big disturbances in 2017-2020 many of the BLM leaders went on to new careers spending the donations collected by their organization or subgroups on luxury goods, travel and expensive houses. A new case of this just popped up in the news today. Hard to go back to street level resistance when you spent a few years basking in the lush life.
Like nearly all ad-hoc rebel forces recruited and supported by the US government and its sidekicks ( Democratic Party) I think the Antifas were ( at least the ones in Portland) were thrown off the gravy train as soon as Biden won, in a sort of short sighted move ,typical of the Dems attitude towards workers no longer needed. The reason I think this is that in the week following Biden’s election the Democrat/Biden election headquarters in Portland was attacked, defaced and had all the windows broken out. My guess is this was the displeasure of the Biden shock troops at getting cut off after they were no longer needed. I am aware that Antifa continued to be active elsewhere ( Atlanta) until the Georgia authorities figured out how to roll up their leadership structure.
@Neon Vincent #2: Quoting myself from a recent print APA article. I started with echoing our host’s economic disparity complaints about who does and doesn’t earn enough to live on, but then continued with:
“For that matter, in [the working-class or what I call hands-on side of the divide], most of those college-educated people putting their degrees to work are more likely to be a hindrance to your life than a benefit. Sure, it’s necessary to have good doctors and engineers. But most college graduates employed in their field of study who interact with your life are doing things like writing unfair terms of service you can’t understand and have no choice but to agree to, deciding whether you’re allowed to move your own shed on your own property or let your ten-year-old walk a mile outdoors unattended, developing AIs to automate your job yet again, telling you not to teach your kid to read “too early” because it will interfere with their educational plans, working for corporations trying to get more of your money not by offering you something that’s worth more, but finding more ways to squeeze a little more revenue from the same transactions (“new improved” packaging for a smaller amount of potato chips), and countless other annoyances. That sad pet squirrel story symbolized a lot, on the eve of the election, for countless people…”
I would add that even the “doctors” exception has caveats. While I don’t fully share the general opinion about Western medicine prevalent here, I’ll point out that consulting a doctor, like consulting a lawyer, is usually a sign of trouble in your life, no matter how helpful that particular doctor or lawyer might be to you in that particular case. You don’t want to be seeing a doctor because you don’t want to be sick or injured…. even though if you ARE sick or injured, you might be glad to see them. Increased emphasis on preventive medicine means you’re more often seeing a doctor when you’re not sick or injured, but that’s rarely a positive experience either, being nagged about lifestyle, obscure numbers in your blood workup, and/or all the “recommended” screening tests you haven’t had.
If you look at the map there is a line of small earthquakes from the Gulf of Baja headed for Lake Tahoe and now Red Bluff California.
https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?extent=17.60214,-127.00195&extent=51.37178,-105.46875&range=week&listOnlyShown=true
The earthquakes drop off the map after a week so don’t delay. This line of activity is to the west of the Walker Lane which is another known fracture zone. California is being restless.
Regarding the myth of eternal progress: to the universe and beyond! Does it matter if it’s attainable or not? Many people, Elon Musk among them, find great motivation and meaning in life by striving towards that end, and in the process of doing so, give hope and meaning and even a reason to live to countless others. Perhaps it’s a dream (I incline to that view), but dreams are a part of life, part of what give individuals, peoples, societies a reason to get up in the morning and work together.
When Musk’s ‘claws’ caught the returning Starship a couple of months ago, I was struck not by the magnitude of that feat, but by the cheering crowds of staffers, a UNIFIED group of people totally involved in and committed to a project that inspires them and spurs them to become the best they can be. And if some of the great philosophers are right, that dreams create reality, they might even succeed.
To Michael Martin #31:
My guess is that the Israeli government and people would absolutely not go for it. First, I assume the Israeli government thinks they will achieve their objectives, and they don’t care the human cost to the Palestinians. They also assume the US will always support them to the hilt. Second, as far as I can tell from the news, the Israeli population overall supports the Gaza offensive. Third, and probably decisive; Israel is the Promised Land (promised them by God). In connection with that is the Evangelicals thought that Jerusalem has to be held by the Jews and the Temple rebuilt for the Second Coming to happen. Jerusalem is a holy city for the Muslims, too. For how wonderful religious wars can be, see French Wars of Religion or the 30 Years War for some lovely examples.
Now if the US can’t support them (we go broke, Russia exposes us as a sham military power, dedollarization, or something as yet unknown) i would bet that we would be the destination of choice.
Also, I very highly recommend A Peace to End All Peace, by David Fromkin, to help understand the origin of the current Middle East. It covers essentially 1914-1922. I wont summarize, but I consider it a must-read if you want some idea of the background, which the current situation developed from. In his conclusion, he points out that the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was an event comparable to the fall of the western Roman Empire. That took about 1500 years to work out, and he points out that in the process, some groups (the Albigensians, for example) were wiped out. He says that this doesn’t mean it will take 1500 years for the Middle East to work out, but it gives an idea of the magnitude of the disruption.
Again, if you have any interest, or wish a better understanding of how the Middle East got this way, i can’t recommend this book highly enough.
Cugel
For #6, writer Industrial Alchemy, I recently found a wonderful resource for legally accessing several major archives of academic articles (for instance Science, Nature, the Cochrane Library, and JSTOR) with good download and use rights: the “Wikipedia Library” program, https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/. It takes an up-front time and work investment, but if you create a Wikipedia account and make 500 edits to Wikipedia pages over 6 months, your Wikipedia volunteering will then be repaid with access to the many excellent resources in the Wikipedia Library. Access can then be maintained indefinitely by doing at least 10 more edits every thirty days. The implicit quid pro quo is that you’ll use the access to continue to improve Wikipedia as a public good and also advertise the academic journals you cite in the process, thus helping the academics migrate their print work and their historical reputations across the bumpy transition into the Internet era.
Getting started with Wikipedia editing can be a minefield, but if you avoid controversies and stick to correcting spelling and punctuation at first, or if you make substantive edits specifically in the humanities and stick carefully to directly cited, scholarly sources (history of alchemy might suit you nicely), then there’s a lot of good, simple, honest work to do. It’s not hard to get to 500 edits in 6 months or maintain the 10 edits per 30 days after. An edit can be as simple as a single correction of a misspelling or missing punctuation.
In passing, I’ll also say that since for better and worse Wikipedia is de facto a crucial educational resource today, it’s a great place to work out karmic tangles about one’s relationships to unjust consensuses and to resentments against unjust consensuses. In the local symbolism, I recommend blue candles, Thursdays, and editing in multiples of four…
Good afternoon John,
Firstly, my condolences on the loss of your father. May his soul rest in peace in the summer lands, and may the gods give you support at this challenging time.
Secondly, I’m pleased to read above about the further books you have been working on in the Ariel Moravec series. They have been shaping up very nicely indeed, great page turners, and I’m looking forward to where the characters go next. There seems to be plenty of scope for more adventures, and I’m finding the magic and characters a lot more convincing than, that, other series of books by er, RJ Kowling or somebody.
Kind regards
Averagejoe
Mary, look into the aftermath of the 2022-2023 Atlanta riots coordinated by Antifa. Instead of doing as Democratic officials had done in previous riots, and turning the rioters loose without charges, the Atlanta city government denied bail, slapped dozens of people with domestic terrorism charges, and started arresting the lawyers and other upper-level people; they also publicized the fact that most of the ones arrested came from other states. The stories are still readily available online.
Blue Sun, the Russians responded to the first (rather feeble) wave of US and British cruise missiles by using a previously unknown hypersonic missile, the Oreshnik, to take out underground shelters near the Ukrainian city of Dnipro; the site is still off limits to reporters, but information trickling out suggests that the Oreshnik imploded the upper four levels of the underground base, and nobody’s been able to reach the levels below that and see what happened there. Another, even weaker wave of cruise missiles followed; the Russians have announced that they will be responding shortly, but nobody outside the Kremlin knows how. The point being made is that the Russians have options other than nukes, and some of them are pretty fierce. I don’t see nuclear war as being any more likely at this point.
Tony, the crucial point is to keep the two forces distinct while locking them into interaction. Let’s take your anxiety about your business as an example. First, you have to unpack the emotions that combine to produce that anxiety, which may be complex — many adults, for example, are still dealing with unresolved emotional conflicts from childhood, and those emotions have to be identified and resolved or they’ll just keep rising up to mess with your life. Second, once you’ve identified everything involved and dealt with irrelevant emotions that are flowing into it, you get the two strongest relevant emotions and lock them into place with each other without confounding them — in Fortune’s examples, you experience anger as anger, shame as shame, and fear as fear, let yourself feel them, and use each one as a barrier to acting out the other.
KAN, it’s an excellent theme for meditation!
Michael, I have no idea if I’ll be able to find a publisher for it, but I’m assembling the posts into a book as we go. It should work out to quite respectable length.
Sandwiches, thanks for these.
Ecosophian, that seems quite reasonable to me. It’s worth taking a moment to reflect on the fact that we’re alive to witness the all-time peak of human population…
Brent, fair enough, but those are only two of many phenomena of the Path. I don’t know of a book on those two things specifically. More generally, there hasn’t been a lot of writing so far on the individual psychology of Western occult spirituality — authors in the field have had a lot of other things to do.
Andy, I know the feeling. I enjoy fiction but only if it’s something more than a time-wasting exercise — and there’s a lot that never gets beyond that. Have you read Dion Fortune’s occult novels? She intended them as initiatory experiences as well as first-rate occult instruction.
Kimberly, thanks for this.
Mrdobner, yes, that’s magic. You concentrated on the positive for the whole period of the exercise; that action had effects on your consciousness; and those effects radiated out from you. New Thought practitioners used that sort of thing all the time to improve their lives. I like the idea of celebrating a birthday by writing one positive affirmation for every year of life — that would be one way to start the next year of life with the most positive energy you can.
Slithy, if the traditional lore is anything to go by, your memories of previous lives inevitably start to surface as you wind up your material incarnations, and once you’ve died for the last time you’ll be able to remember all of it and see how all your lives fit together in a single meaningful trajectory through time. Your book idea’s an interesting one, but I’m not sure how it would work in practice: hmm…
J.L.Mc12, thanks for this.
Chuaquin, Dmitry’s an interesting cat. You’d think he’d be more open to the slow-collapse theory, since Russia didn’t plunge straight into the stone age when the Soviet Union fell!
Robert K., thank you.
J.L.Mc12, hmm! Thanks for this also.
Josh, Workers’ Parties by and large don’t care about the interests of the workers either. They just mouth the rhetoric.
Chuaquin, that’s good to hear!
Johnny, thank you. I haven’t had that experience with the stars, but then I live in an urban area.
Moonwolf8, you might want to sit down sometime and do some journaling about that habit of saying “I hate you;” unresolved resentment isn’t a good thing to leave in yourself.
Eagle Fang, it’s a good question to ask.
Clay, interesting. Yeah, that degree of hubristic overconfidence makes sense.
Siliconguy, hmm. It may turn out to be nothing, but it might be a sign of something really spectacularly ghastly on its way.
Karalan, many dreams can unite people. I’d prefer to see people choose ones that have a possibility of coming true. Instead of loading all our hopes on the mirage of space travel, maybe we could build a better world right here.
Averagejoe, thank you! My basic rule in Ariel’s stories is that all the magic is actually possible — i.e., the sort of thing that skilled occultists can do. Of course I also try to have my characters act like real people, which I know is unfashionable these days. I’m glad those work for you.
@ Michael Martin
A few stray thoughts.
First Jews have a solid claim to be the indigenous people of present day Israel. The Cananites were there first but there is nothing left of their civilization. Others have long standing ties to the region as well. Point being the Jews are not European colonizers they are simply retuning to their homeland. There’s a reason the Zionists didn’t choose NYC to settle. I don’t think it likely that they would voluntarily “wind up” the state of Israel, in exchange for US citizenship.
That said, we ought to extend citizenship to Israelis so they’ll have a place to go if needed.
As you point out, much of the world is hostile to Israel. It baffles me that nations are hostile to freedom, democracy, and capitalism.
There will come a day when the US can’t prop up Israel but that day is not here. I think we should support our best friend in the ME for as long as we are able.
IMO the 2 state solution is doomed to failure – Israel pulled out of Gaza in ’05. We see the results. Israel will have to control Gaza for as long aas it takes for Gazans to want a state more than they want Israel to disappear. This could take a few generations. I don’t see another realistc solution.
As you say “Thus, the demise of the State of Israel is only a matter of time.” The demise of all states is only a matter of time. What’s the rush ?
Finally I don’t think we need to “wind up” Israel to make peace in the ME. Some of those states will make peace and some will not. No use giving up Israel (not that it’s ours to give up) in exchange for empty promisses.
Hello JMG,
In your answer to Ashlar you wrote about Freemasonry, “…male occultists generally end up in the Craft, and it’s the best venue I know of to make contact with them and get invited to invitation-only esoteric groups.” Is this route available for men only? I’m asking because my pursuit of occult studies has been a lonely one, and I’d be delighted to meet people with whom I can share it. I haven’t figured out how to go about it, but Masonic Lodges (that is a building that says Masonic Lodge) are ubiquitous where I live.
Mr. Greer & Co. .. Whilst gliding over that prickly zero hedgerow this morning, I noticed an article highlighting how some, um, ‘defender’ of the whole wokish ‘Defund the Police’ scheme (soo popular only fews years back .. only to be continually pitched into the garbage can of bad ideas..) has been called out for spending org. donations on mucho bling! – paternizing of fancy restaurants, travels/trips, etc. Seems as though his future will face a ‘Defund and face some Justice, A$$hole’ type comeuppance! On the flip side .. I read in yesterday’s local rag that OUR community’s finest have purchased a humongous over-kill assault vehicle … for reasons vague, AND what I deem as ‘surveillance’ drones .. as the yummy icing on top! All whilst the local homeless population burgeons ever larger, with the rest of us constanly facing taxes, fees, and rents continuing apace via the astute wizz-dumb of the statusquotarians that run the show. Popo madness on both sides. ‘sigh’
JMG, thank you for the report about Atlanta. Arrests are particularly important as a public record of unlawful conduct. Please accept my condolences for your loss.
Clay Dennis, I hate to be the annoying scratched record here, but if you reside in Portland, those Antifa thugs need to be outed and named. They have had a taste of Being Important, and many, the most hard core, will not willingly go back to productive ordinariness. I respectfully suggest you do not want these delinquents on your city council a decade hence,
BBC is reporting an Israeli-Lebanon ceasefire this morning. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2d3gj9ewxo
Ian Welsh has an interesting commentary at his blog. My guess, only a guess at this point, is that someone on the Trump team told an Israeli counterpart–and, yes, it is part of the incoming admin’s job to establish good working relationships with foreign govts.–you have to give us something or Congress, animated by “fear of God and the next election” won’t give you anything.
Kimberley, I read your article. My response is that I have all too often seen righteous rage turned against the wrong targets. My fear is that while your side is going after meek and inoffensive ordinaries, your real enemies are in hiding, licking their wounds and planning their comeback. I suggest it is a great folly to think that coming down on the wrong persons will “send a message”, i.e. intimidate, the other side.
Since novels are a theme in this thread, I’d like to mention an author I do not think I recall seeing mentioned here, the English author, Elizabeth Goudge.
I think many here would find her books a treat, what I will say is that her characters are luminous. I’ll stop there because otherwise I might not stop.
I wonder if anyone else here has read any novels of hers?
Condolences, JMG. That’s two losses that act like kicks in the gut for most of us. Corragio!
About reincarnation.
Most people may not be aware that Judaism quietly generally accepts a somewhat limited view that reincarnation exists for at least some people for a non-infinite duration. Although, given the GREAT variety of views in that tradition, others have views better aligned with eastern religions. Also, in Jewish kabbalistic teachings (the origin of the now extensive syncretistic kabbalistic lore of the magical traditions or WMT) there are three basic aspects to the soul (netzach-animal, ruach-rationative, neshama-access to the spiritual), with two others higher, rarely accessed but present.
An aside, I know a LOT of people ascribe a monolithic world view and conspiratorial world action to Jews in general Israelis in particular. Then they proceed to ascribe to them all the evilly evil stuff they imagine (or want to do themselves). My own experience is that this is not and cannot be the case, because Judaism is only partly a religion and a creed. It’s also (and has been since inception) a tribal affiliation, with at least 5,000 years of splits, disagreements, even wars between the clans, families, and the tribe as a whole. Look under the hood. FWIW, the same is true for Roman Catholicism or almost any other large group in history. Also, most Jews accept that the bible they study is not literally, historically true at one flat material level in every case and situation. Only modernists, oddly, think this is the case. So talking about bad things (as with the Ammonites) in the books is…strange. The Talmud and even mainstream (Rashi) commentators take up all those topics, often extensively. They are often as much if not more horrified by them than moderns are. E.g. the counsel to destroy all six, seven, or ten (depends where you’re readin) “ites.” The fact that some biblically relatively illiterate jamoke like Netanyahu cites such horrors uncritically is not evidence against Jews and Judaism. It’s evidence against Netanyahu and his ilk. End of rant.
Back to reincarnation: there is then the question: who or what reincarnates? If I am John in this lifetime and Yitzhak in a previous one and Sridevi in another one, do the mind-streams in the former lives (a terminology of Buddhism) constitute the same or a different self from my sense of being me in this one? Must I take ownership of what Yitzhak or Sridevi or any of the other associated pasts contributing to this lifetime…actually did? Why? Who am I, really? Is there a higher self that encompasses all our other levels of selfhood? Why or why not?
Is the “I” in a future incarnation “me” in some sense? Why? Do I actually need to worry about future “me” when the present one is so busy dealing with current life challenges? As for me, I don’t think there are definitive answers, but intimations or actual memories of prior lives DO seem to arise from time to time in my meditations, at least. And those of many, many others. Strange deja vu experiences others have had that I’ve heard of point to this as well.
In the Christian New Testament, Jesus asks about a man born blind: “Who sinned? this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?” Unequivocally pointing to reincarnation as being found in early Christian lore, along with other passages, especially in the gospels. Along with the declared-heretical teachings of the early church father Origin.
Tibetan Buddhism teaches, oddly, that while there are countless rebirths, there is no such thing as reincarnation, because there is no essential self to continue or be reborn in a new incarnation. Betcha most of you didn’t know that! Hinduism, generally, tends to the opposite view.
FWIW, I know nothing of Islamic teachings on this issue. That info wasn’t available when I was deeply into these studies.
Then there are extensive Western teachings through various occult streams of learning that speak to this. Not least of them are the magisterial works of Col. A. E. Powell of the original Theosophical movement, on the etheric, astral and mental bodies. I found them very informative. And of course Dion Fortune, most explicitly in her fiction.
There are lots of near death experiences (NDEs) recounted on the internet (e.g. YouTube) which I suspect are just about worthless as testimony to the structure of the non-physical, but are certainly moving and meaningful to those having them. Few of those reported there for Western eyes have anything other than conventional Christianity in them, although there are a great many reported elsewhere that do have exceptionally interesting implications and are not limited in that way. Or maybe the algorithms assigned to me by YT tend to populate that way…
Likewise the recounted experiences of those enjoying inner-world contacts with DMT entities, etc. while partaking of the psychedelic concoctions. Moving, powerful, transformative: they ae not necessarily evidence of “objective” (pace Kant) truth.
So, reincarnation? Aside from our leader here, JMG, with his adept’s memories of former lives and their errors and mistakes (which he says others can also have, with certain kinds of inner work), and cites evidence he personally knows of those who remember; do other readers of this blog have memories that persuade them of anything? I’d like to know.
My own view is that if we “keep to our knitting,” we may eventually find out, but we will have much the same need in the future to “keep to our knitting” as we did here. Doesn’t change our current responsibilities except to add scope to them. Nothing wrong with scope. Also, it seems that a great many of the world traditions accept reincarnation in one form or another. I’m one of those who doesn’t subscribe to the view that my own generation is the most enlightened ever, and that my ancestors were idiots. So, if the ancients often thought reincarnation was what the story tells, I give a lot weight to that. This general topic is in line with my Aspbergian interests/specialties (lore accumulated over 70 years), so I have way too much to say on the topic.
Almost totally off this topic:
I have just discovered the extensive work of a novelist: Guy Gavriel Kay, who incorporates an organic perspective on the life, death and rebirth of civilizations and religions with a soupcon of inexplicable often mystical and at times deeply spiritual experiences of some of his protagonists. He keeps the mystery alive. He’s more than scholar enough to have read Toynbee and Spengler and, indeed, shows evidence of that. Anyone else have comments on this? His fantastic reworking of history is currently fascinating to me.
Batstrel,
You might do a bit of background reading on neuroscience. Most of our mental processing as humans is done by the unconscious mind, rather than the conscious. The thing is, the unconscious mind doesn’t process negatives well, so any given statement will be stripped of negative aspects and processed as a positive.
That being the case, your comments come across to me as a series of “I want… I want… I want…”
It suggests that there’s actually a clinging, a craving, that you might want to explore.
That being the case, I’d agree with Alvin, #95, that it might be worth exploring Therevada Buddhism, which addresses precisely this issue.
Or perhaps the revival Druidry of Iolo Morganwg, in which each incarnation is an opportunity to examine our response to events, and to seek to manifest as far as possible the divine potential of the species in which we’ve incarnated.
Of course, it’s up to you and you alone how you choose to respond.
Here is a concise, readable summary of current scientific research on glyphosate and its effect on human health.
https://responsibletechnology.org/the-best-article-on-glyphosate-with-comments-from-jeffrey-smith/
GHB stands for Glyphosate Herbicide Based. ED stands for Edocrine Disruptor.
I am waiting to see what will be the attitude of the new Agriculture Secretary designate about chemical farming and human, not to mention environmental, health. Given that the announcement of her nomination was delayed and slid in the back door of public opinion, I am not optimistic.
JMG, you said: “the programming (how’s that for truth in advertising!) on visual media is intended to produce unthinking, emotionally driven reactions”
How true. I remember being in a lecture by one of the founders of a large and agency, who had published a book called “Love without reason” which was essentially how to get people to love you brand and not think about it. It was very sophisticated.
https://saatchikevin.com/interview/love-without-reason-media-marketing-pdf/
JMG: may I belatedly add my condolences for your loss.
I lost both of my parents in close succession a couple of years ago. We were close, and it hit me very hard. One can only take stock and keep going, wishing those we’ve lost the best in their journey onwards.
Mrdobner #85
Yes, you followed all principles of magic:
Set a clear intention ( affirmation) / do a physical deed to set it in this reality ( write it down) / let go of it, not dwell on it ( went to sleep).
You can call it magic or you can call it the principle of our reality. Your reality is what you expect your reality to be. Or said differently, where attention goes, energy flows. If you expect good things, good things will happen.
You should test it out more, do exactly what you did, exactly the same steps. Try something small that you have no emotional attachment to.
This is your ‘ritual’ – doesn’t need to be more elaborate than that.
John, now we’re talking about Dmitry Orlov, I’d like to ask you: What is he doing nowadays? It seems he had his 10 minutes of glory in the old good times of peak oil fashion, some years ago, but I don’t know what’s his life and career as “doomer” nowadays.
Hi JMG,
I’m catching up after an extended hiatus from the blog, so I apologize if this question has been addressed already. I’m wondering about the distinction you’ve drawn between ceremonial magic and other forms. Does an action only constitute ceremonial magic if it includes all 3 elements of gesture, vibrated words of power, and directed imagination? How would you classify something like the exercises presented in Experience of the Inner World’s, which uses mental forms very similar to those used in magical ritual but without the accompanying movements and sounds?
On a related note, I believe you’ve noted that ceremonial magic tends to produce more intense effects than other forms. Is this simply due to the additive effects of the gestures, chants, and material props on the magician’s conscious focus? Or because these physical elements give the mental ones a “channel” of sorts into the external world?
Thanks as always for sharing your thoughts!
-Fred
Peter Denk assumes, the Antifa and other groups havent struck the USA after the election because the losing side has something else in store.
He wondered whether Trump would really become president and whether the election even finds place. He stays with his scenario he says, because until January 20th Trump is not really president.
From clairvoyant people he speaks of (Egon Fischer) he gathers that Trump will have an important function but not be president.
Johan Galtung found the USA to be either a dictatorship or disseparating by 2025. Peter Denk predicts this year will be the “1989” of central Europe at least, where the political system disintegrates (Germany by September 2025).
Many such seers seem to agree the Russians will be there in Europe, but not as invaders, as peace keeping troops.
Peter Denk is also the follower and practicioner of a hinduistic branch it seems. He says the Sri Vitthal Dham Mandir tempel in the center of Germany, ceremonially opened in June 2023, is there for a protective reason of the region, and that on day of the opening symbols were visible in the diagrams of the “Schumann frequency”, an electromagnic spectrum coming to the Earth from the cosmos apparently, and measurable.
The astrologer Astrowolf predicted in Spring 2024 civil war like events in Germany by June 2024 (it didn’t seem that drastic), later “migrant(or, “foreign population”) violence events over Europe by beginning of November 2024. The Netherlands football riots between foreign Israeli football fans and domestic middle easteners around that time might qualify for that.
Hey JMG
Turns out that we won’t need to wonder about the social media ban in Australia, as it has officially passed parliament and will come into effect next year. Apparently the major parties rather quickly and forcefully had it passed despite a lot of opposition from crossbenchers, and it appears that social media companies are the only ones that will be punished for any breaches of the new law.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-28/social-media-age-ban-passes-parliament/104647138
Hollywoods spy/military shows have always been a form of propaganda, but they also signal the the foreign policy thinking of the regime. Since 9/11 they have mostly about foiling the “terrorists” in any and all places around the Middle East and of course stopping their evil deeds In the homeland.
One of the most recent of these shows ( created by Yellowstone’s Taylor Sheridan) is” Lioness”. The premise is that women are recruited to infiltrate organizations and kill baddies. The first season involved killing some kind of terrorist kingpin in Lebanon. But this season postulates that the evil doer in question is a Chinese operative in Mexico. This agent , at the behest of the Chinese government, is working with the drug Cartels to carry out mischief across the border, such as the kidnapping and ransom of a US senator in Texas. This is of course has the US government and CIA all in a froth. So they set out to use the Lioness program to kill this Chinese agent and send a message to the Chinese government.
This is a big change in Hollywood political propaganda. It has not been since the pre-Nixon days of McGarret fighting Wo Fat on Hawaii 5-0 that American TV or the movies has depicted direct violent conflict with the Chinese.
I certainly hope this is a flash in the pan and not a long term trend in mainstream propaganda.
Wer here
JMG firstly who are you holding up? I offered my prayers for your father etc.
And for second in my opinion WW3 is really nigh like around the corner, firstly NATO lost the plot apparently and are doing everything to provoke Russia (ATACMS fired into Kursk region, Attacks on Syria, attacks on banking sector they are doing everything to start a giant war) and i think that Trump cannot end this war either:
A If Trump will pull out it will be seen as a disaster at the beginning of his presidency,
B Russia will not stop the war until it’s objectives are meet (if they could fight for years what’s stopping they from fighting for a few more especially)
C Ukraine is already destroyed (millions fled to Poland and other countries majority saying that they will never come back because they literally don’t have anything to come back to, economy and infrastructure destroyed) at this point especially if ICBMs start raining on the cities
D trump elected a known warmonger to an aide to Ukraine he cannot back down although he might force the EU to spend only it’s money on Ukraine (like let Europe pay for everything)
E the US cannot provide enough weapons to Ukraine and Israel at the same time what will they do??
F People are now ranting about Taiwan seriously isn’t the like tons of unresolved conflicts in the Middle East and Europe???
I belive that what you said in your post in November 20th about “Russia is nearing it’s victory in Ukraine” is simply wrong and if things go really wrong an nuclear exchange can start anytime now….
@Alvin #87: Such schemes aren’t novel. The story may be apocryphal but I read somewhere that the 1930’s German Chancellor (you-know-who) wanted to give the Jews a ‘homeland’ on the island of Madagascar. My dad (a WWII veteran) opined that Australia could have granted them the northern half of the Northern Territory.
Academic research—another comment on academic research. If you live within reasonable distance of a college or university you may find that they offer community library cards, usually with a yearly fee. This will allow you to check out books, use the research computers in the library to access the journals that the library subscribes to and also consult reference librarians to guide your research. Unfortunately, these cards may not give the same access as students and faculty have, but still worth looking into. Do not forget that not everything is on the internet. Depending on what you are researching there may be archives of old journals, maps, photographs, historical materials of various types.
While the official Democratic party reaction to the election has been more muted than in 2016 I have seen over the top reactions from individuals and even some organizations on social media. People who seem genuinely convinced that someone will be coming for them, that Trump is literally a second Hitler. Most of it strikes me as psychological projection–all the people who would have been good little Red Guards, herding their algebra teacher and their landlord out to the reeducation camps naturally fear the same for themselves.
Rita
Americans are hilarious at this time of year. “Is it too early for Christmas? Before Thanksgiving?!” Meanwhile as far as I’m concerned Thanksgiving was a blip a month and a half ago – let the Christmas spirit roll!
Illustrious druid, I am sorry for your loss.
I would like to ask a question not only to you but also to the community
Currently I am still struggling with my obsessive compulsive disorder, plus I am a little more depressed than usual due to the fact that I realize that I am getting older.
Actually I already went through this when I turned thirty but now a decade later the feeling is worse.
I am distressed by the fact that I have not done anything memorable and that I am not as I would like to be, in addition to having the feeling that at this age it is too late to start anything.
Is it wise to accept that I am too ambitious?
The truth is that I feel more defeated than usual.
Sugerencias
@Johnny,
I’m also in Canada. I’m in a medium sized city in BC. I’ve been seeing less stars over the past few years since a new building went up near my home with lights that stay on all night. I’m a bit of a backyard astronomer, so I was very disappointed by this, even if the childcare was desperately needed by many in our community.
@Johnny #101 – I don’t know what kind of streetlamps they use where you live – in Germany, at least the old Natrium-vapour lamps with their characteristic orange light are currently replaced by LED lights. In most of the towns in the (rural) area where I live this has already happened. The result was that the villages now look quite dark when you approach them, although the streets are thoroughly illuminated. The emitters of the new lamps are really bright, but they are small and there is much less stray light than with the old lamps. Additionally, they are dimmed at night. The result is much less light pollution and an energy consumption of roughly 20% of what the old lamps consumed. Generally positive, although the lamps produce a strong stroboscope effect which I don’t like.
No idea if anything of the above applies to your part of the world – and of course it’s quite possible that lamps are being turned off at night (some villages around here are doing this, too) or that damaged lamps are simply not repaired or replaced.
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
@Jennifer #106 – I’m a teacher and all I can say is that “the screen” is having a very negative effect. Some of what is displayed on these screens may intensify this, but even what’s considered to be harmless content has negative consequences since it’s screen time anyway. And various studies show the negative effects of smartphones and tablets both physiologically (like negatively effecting the development of the eye-ball) and mentally.
That being said, I think this law as it is being presented for example in the linked Guardian-article will do next to nothing to improve the situation. It’s just the old game – we find something that is negative when consumed excessively so we try to ban it. This approach doesn’t work too well. For some time I thought it worked reasonably well with tobacco (when I was at school roughly 50% of my fellow students smoked – today it’s below 10%) but now everybody is vaping and these devices make the good old cigarette look like a real classic. The important questions like why are people prone to addictive behaviour and what are the circumstances that lead to children being excessively exposed to screens are usually not even asked. Sad. But yes, the best you can do is to promote your children using their time in a wholesome manner.
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
Hey, JMG, hope you’re as well as circumstances permit, and thank you for hosting this space. I’ll also wish the Americans who celebrate it a happy Thanksgiving.
First off, to the commentariat: is there any interest out there for an organized community for those working with the Heathen Golden Dawn system? I’ve brought this up on Magic Monday before, but I thought I’d take this chance to put it in front of a wider section of the commentariat. It’s also very possible there’s already an effort like this that I’ve missed, and in that case I’d appreciate a link.
If it turns out there isn’t one, I’d also be up for helping to make one happen, but I think it should ideally be done by someone with much more occult experience than me. Still, I have to admit I’m a little jealous of the DOGD community, just from the few tantalizing snippets I’ve seen people mention on JMG’s blogs over the years. It’d be neat to have something similar, even if it’s just a plain Discord server or something to start with. Would be happy to hear from anyone interested, and if you prefer you can also DM me at Dreamwidth (same username).
That said, onto some miscellaneous questions and comments:
Re. social media ban for kids and teens
There’s a similar proposal under consideration here in Norway, and I’m 100% in favor personally. IMO there’s no reason we can’t have such a ban while still insisting on free speech for adults. (Besides, maybe the real problem is that a few gargantuan American tech firms are gatekeepers of speech rights to begin with…and if the state really wanted to crack down on dissent, they could just weaponize bank accounts a la the trucker protest anyway.)
I also think another commenter above hit the nail on the head: why does the state hand out iPads and laptops to every schoolkid, and demand that they use them? They’re making it impossible for parents to raise screen-free kids, even the few poor principled souls who might want to try. There seems to be some pushback towards that policy now, but it still baffles me that they thought it was a good idea to begin with. At the very least, teach them to use Linux instead of handing them closed-garden Apple products, if you have to have computers in every school! Would have been cheaper too.
Re. reincarnation and safety
JMG wrote: “[…]if we all reincarnate, nobody can do you any permanent harm at all. Sure, they can kill you, but that just means you shed one body, take a breather on the inner planes, and get a new body in due time.” Apologies for getting a little dark here, but while that’s fair enough, they can also torture you before they kill you. That’s the thing I tend to circle back to when I think about reincarnation in this light.
To be honest, it’s also a thing that would give me an uncomfortable amount of anxiety if I allowed myself to dwell on it. There are so many terrible ways a person can deliberately inflict physical pain on another, and the thought of being on the receiving end of that gives me the creeps. Both the physical aspect and being under the total domination of another human being who wishes you extreme harm. If you reincarnate enough times, isn’t that bound to happen sooner or later? All that said, I get the point that the universe doesn’t care about our comfort in the end.
A couple questions about fiction
1) Turns out you partially answered this one in another comment, but I’ll ask anyway: would you ever write a middle-grade novel, and if so, what kind of story would you want to tell with it? Your comment about wanting to see more “complex, messed-up kids” in them is intriguing, since I feel like most of them tend towards main characters that are either bland, idealized and/or the kind of Chosen Ones I know you’re not a fan of (and neither am I). You’re kind of dipping a toe into young adult with Ariel Moravec, so you never know…
2) Star’s Reach is my favorite novel of yours, but I never really got the title. I’d like to think I have a decent grasp on the English language, but even after consulting several dictionaries, it’s still unclear to me what the word “reach” is meant to refer to in this context. The following Merriam-Webster definition is the closest I can find: ” a continuous stretch or expanse, especially : a straight portion of a stream or river”. As in, the physical location of the Star’s Reach station? Or is it more in the sense of “reaching for the stars”, as the researchers there did? The stars metaphorically “reaching” down to us on Earth? Kind of frivolous, I know, but it’s been bugging me for a while now.
Finally, always happy to get more Ariel Moravec! 🙂
A fine rant from Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk, fitting with the season that’s about to begin: “The Sami women I’m yarning with are unable to use the archaic shorthand of “white” to name the people who are setting up rocket-launching facilities on their lands for space exploration, drilling oil in their sacred sites, killing off their reindeer and language and old people while poisoning or damming their rivers. […] What group or individual could take responsibility for the West appropriating Sami culture in the most barbaric ways at Christmas time? Their shamans were generous enough, early last century, to share with outsiders some spiritual practices involving red and white fly agaric mushrooms in that season, only to have elements of those rituals stolen and co-opted into European culture in sacrilegious ways. Their traditional pointed hats were ripped off and placed on child-like elves. Santa’s camp was moved from Holland to the North Pole, and the shamanic practice of entering dwellings through the chimney (to distribute psychotropic mushrooms) was adapted for his use. He changed the colour of his costume to match the iconic red and white of the Sami mushrooms. Then he took off with their reindeer, giving them stupid names, using them for transport as he expanded the global reach of his holiday empire. If the Sami apocalypse had a soundtrack it would be ‘Jingle Bells’.”
I admit I wasn’t aware of this background – but it seems only logical that there’s some corrupted practice at work. Talking about colours, here in Germany we started having “Black Friday” only a few years ago. Now they have become “Black Friday Week” or even – which almost made the car I was driving at that moment sling – “Magenta Black Friday Week”, a construct which makes it possible for virtually everybody to buy the latest smartphone you always wanted for almost no cash at all from our post-famous Deutsche Post-remnant “Deutsche Telekom”, which has dropped the iconic yellow a long time ago in favour of magenta. It now requires at least 4 visits of 5 technicians of whom it is hard to tell whether incompetence or unwillingness is their most outstanding feature to install a new telephone connection which then still doesn’t really work as it should. (And then I haven’t yet talked about the experience of trying to get somebody on the phone (which phone?) who is qualified to send those guys to your house.) – But don’t worry, we have Magenta Black Friday Week! You really can’t make this up.
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
Good day JMG and all,
I’m curious to learn more about your views on reincarnation, what you remember from your past lives (if you do recall them), and if so, how you cultivated yourself to remember such.
In full disclosure, I come from a Chinese Mahayana Buddhist perspective and I’ve had trouble internalizing the idea of reincarnation and karma. It feels unjust that I bear the wrongdoings of some ignorant me three kalpas ago, and that some poor bugger will bear the weight of my misdeeds three kalpas hence. Your metaphor of a gorilla skinsuit helped to reconcile that idea somewhat, but I’d like to hear more from your perspective.
I apologize in advance if this has already been discussed this in depth elsewhere – I have read part of your two previous posts (Aug 2017 and Aug 2023) as I post this, and I’d be happy to read more!
JMG,
So excited for The Carnelian Moon! The Ariel Moravec series is I think my favorite of your fiction, although I did like your tentacle novels very much.
A question: If you are willing to say, have you given any thought to the next book club book as we wrap up the last few chapters of Lévi? I’ll start keeping an eye out for a copy, if so.
Very interesting Joe Rogan (JR) interview with Marc Andreesen (MA) this week. Within the first hour, the two discussed UFOs (MA’s conclusions generally mirror our host’s); the existence of angels and demons; MA’s view, greatly influenced by a religious-scholar friend, that Medieval people were much better prepared, psychologically, to deal with the future of robotics, AI, and drone warfare than we are because they took it for granted that angels, demons, and supernatural entities existed. From there, JR and MA meandered into a discussion of DJT vis-a-vis Cicero’s fishponds and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.
I don’t have a Spotify account so I listen to JR on youtube (I don’t care to watch because I’m usually doing something else at the same time as I’m listening, and the visual of the JR format adds little to the ideas shared in the interviews). Of note re JR — he did not endorse DJT until after interviewing Trump, Vance, and Musk. His leanings are/were more “left” than “right.” JR also extended an invitation to the other candidate to appear on his podcast, which was declined (in a rather disingenuous fashion). Of note to anyone who might be tempted to watch or listen, the JR podcast contains “adult” language.
I had never listened to JR prior to his interviews with DJT, Vance, and Musk, but I thoroughly enjoyed all three. It was fascinating to watch all of them make their case to the American people in a long-form format — JR interviews generally last between two to three hours, and have an audience of tens of millions of people. It’s also fascinating to me that one Presidential candidate willingly embraced that format and made a strong argument for his vision of the future of the US, while the other candidate chose to go on Call Her Daddy (which has a fraction of the reach of JR, and is of much shorter duration). My opinion is that a candidate who can’t satisfactorily answer softball questions like, “What has been your biggest mistake?” (CNN/Anderson Cooper) or “Is there anything you would have done differently over the last four years?” (The View) would have been comically out of her depth not only intellectually but policy-defense-wise. I needed to remind my Democrat father this morning that Harris rose to power in San Francisco by dint of being Willie Brown’s mistress (he was married the duration of their long affair) and that Brown was the godfather of the California political machine–he secured/strong-armed her elected position as SF DA, and of course was the political might behind her rise to CA Attorney General and later Senator. I was in San Francisco during the Brown-Harris years and watched it happen in real time (at the same time that my single-woman, solidly “middle class” values internally screamed in horror at the thought of carrying on with a married man–bad, bad karma). She was strikingly beautiful as a young woman, and of very limited intellectual capacity. California has this amazing ability of promoting its policy-failing leaders up the ladder–case(s) in point, Newsom and Harris, who have been instrumental in creating the homeless-industrial complex and promoting lawlessness in California’s cities. Both politicians’ policies had much to do with our decision to leave the Bay Area for Portland, OR (egads, another wrecked Blue city).
Today is Thanksgiving in the US, and I’m thankful for our gracious host and this insightful commentariat (and that we now live in Idaho, where a lot of political common sense prevails).
I read Moon Magic and The Sea Priestess earlier this year and really liked them, I’ll probably reread them after some time to see what stands out to me after more practical experiences. There were a lot of “oh, it’s not just me,” moments even though I’ve never attempted any ritual outside a slow, beginner’s SoP. That really drew me in, I’m not so used to getting that. I’m stalking some vintage copies of her other novels online.
I’ve read a sprinkling of teaching novels from other traditions, but if anyone has recommendations for fiction that teaches something real about magic (even if there are some fantastical elements), I’m all ears.
I compare LLMs and the people who get excited about them, to the Radiance in your tentacle novels. Only far less consistent and organised 🙂
A couple of data points on climate and peak oil that might assist you. The Society of Petroleum Engineers are now talking more about “energy cannabalism”, or the dramatically declining EROEI at the well-head. They are predicting that by 2050, up to 50% of oil extracted will be needed to keep the rest flowing.
https://jpt.spe.org/plummeting-energy-return-on-investment-of-oil-and-the-impact-on-global-energy-landscape.
The Climate Brink blog, which is staffed by experienced and well-regarded climatologists, who are largely free from the doom-drum, provided an interesting summary to show how emissions profiles have long since departed from the old RCP8 scenario. However, despite this, government policy remains set on RCP8 or worse. I of course don’t necessarily see this as a good thing, as at some point the IPCC models fail in say, a two Hadley cell climate model, or they’ve also ignored, or been unable to handle the complexity to begin with. But to be fair on them, they’ve been very accurate so far.
https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/emissions-are-no-longer-following
So, despite the media, and public rhetoric, geology, and the planet do get their say, and their say is different to most of ours.
Clarke aka Gwydion #117: “In the Christian New Testament, Jesus asks about a man born blind: ‘Who sinned? this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Unequivocally pointing to reincarnation as being found in early Christian lore, along with other passages, especially in the gospels.”
Actually, other people ask Jesus that question, and he responds “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.” (John 9: 2-41) https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%209%3A2-41&version=NIV
There may very well have been belief in reincarnation in the early Christian church, but given the context, I’m not sure this passage is evidence of that.
Hi JMG,
I hope you had a most blessed thanksgiving day!
I’m trying to help my daughter with a suggestion for an affirmation. She is having trouble focusing on school. Would “I choose to focus on school work” be better than “I choose my focus” ? Maybe there is something better?
Thanks!
Matt
Regarding my post last week about the red and blue states and how confusing that is for a Canadian, with our red Liberals, blue Conservatives, orange NDP, green Greens, and blue/white Bloc in Parliament and the purple People’s Party not in yet. I realized that the only primary/secondary colour not represented is yellow. So a few days ago I read about a guy in Nova Scotia who’s starting up a new party, the Future Party and its colour is yellow.
So now that we’ve run out of colours, we need to get rid of some parties. I was thinking of sending our red Liberals and blue Conservatives to Washington. The U.S. isn’t quite at peak insanity yet, so that should push it there.
Actually, there is black, but that’s the colour of pirates; white, but that’s the colour of surrender; grey is the colour of my hair; and brown……well
brown is the colour of hazelnuts 🙂
Has anyone read H. Rider Haggard’s novels “She” and “Return of She”? I’m reading them and it’s obvious that both Tolkien and Lewis (and probably many others) read those books growing up: there are lots of parallels between “She-who-must-be-obeyed” and Galadriel in LOTR (also perhaps the Empress Jadis in Lewis’s “The Magician’s Nephew”). Haggard must have been aware of occult teachings including reincarnation, since they’re discussed in the books.
Just thought I’d recommend them to the commentariat: they (and Haggard’s other writings) are fun escapist fiction with some thoughtful discussions about occultism and philosophy, especially the use and abuse of power. His collected works can be downloaded almost for free at the Big Slimy River; they might also be on Gutenberg, though I haven’t looked.
Inna, you might be able to find a Co-Masonic lodge — part of a schismatic branch of Masonry that admits women as well as men. Here are some links:
https://www.universalfreemasonry.org/
https://www.cofreemasonry.org/
https://old.reddit.com/r/comasonry/
Polecat, oh, granted. There’s never a shortage of stupidity on all sides.
Scotlyn, I’m not familiar with her at all. Which of her novels would you recommend to start with?
Clarke, I know a fair number of Jews, and I can certainly concur that no two of them think the same way about much of anything. How much of the Talmud is a decorous recounting of knock-down, drag-out quarrels between rabbis, after all? I do wish that when somebody like Netanyahu shows that he’s a crazed literalist, more Jews would quote Rashi et al. to contradict him, but I know there’s a lot of pressure in the Jewish community not to criticize the government of the nation-state of Israel no matter how badly it behaves.
Mary, thanks for this.
MCB, yep. It’s not as powerful as they wish it was, but — well, Obi-Wan was right.
Bogatyr, many thanks for this. You have my sympathy — my father and I weren’t close, and it was still a gut punch.
Chuaquin, he’s in St. Petersburg and runs some kind of pro-Russian social media venue. I haven’t followed him closely for a while now.
Fred, welcome back! I don’t like to use that kind of constitutive definition for ceremonial magic or, for that matter, much of anything else. To me, ceremonial magic is a historically rooted Western spiritual tradition that uses that label for itself, and the term can be extended to any related tradition that shows enough of a family resemblance to pass for it.
Curt, thanks for the heads up.
J.L.Mc12, if the social media companies know what they’re doing, they’ll cut Australia out of their service area and shut off every Australian’s access. If they can be penalized because some clever 15-year-old figures out a way around their security devices, while the 15-year-old gets by scot free, there’s no point in including adult Australians in their business model.
Clay, hmm! Definitely a straw in the wind. I remember Wo Fat, for what it’s worth.
Wer, thank you; I’m doing okay. As for your comment, why, you’ve made your prediction and I’ve made mine; now we’ll see who’s right.
Bofur, is “Christmas spirit” in Canada a euphemism for 24/7 saturation advertising meant to push lousy products at inflated prices on people who would be better off celebrating Buy Nothing Day? That’s what it is in the US, which is why so many of us respond these days with “Bah! Humbug.”
Achille, thank you for this. As for your question, good heavens, no — forty is still practically young. Laura Ingalls Wilder became a bestseeling author for the first time at 65. Grandma Moses became an artist at the age of 78. Paul Cezanne had his first art show at 56. Peter Mark Roget invented the thesaurus at 73. Paul Kroc started building the Macdonalds restaurant chain at 52. You still have plenty of time to do something with your life, provided that you get up and get at it.
BorealBear, I suggest you contact Isaac Hill, the author of The Heathen Golden Dawn via the publisher, and see if he’s interested. You might also contact the Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn at http://druidical-gd.org/ and ask for their advice and help, which I’m sure they will offer enthusiastically. It would be great to see a Heathen Order of the Golden Dawn up and running! As for torture, well, yes — if Iolo’s teachings are correct, we must be all things, know all things, and suffer all things to complete our journey through material incarnation. There’s no way to sugarcoat that reality; the one thing to keep in mind is that if the teachings are correct, you’ve already been torn to pieces and devoured alive by other animals many times during your animal incarnations, since of course that’s how most animals die.
With regard to middle grade novels, probably not. You may be surprised to hear that I didn’t intend the Ariel Moravec novels to be for the young-adult market! I wrote them for the cozy mystery market. Anything aimed at children, though, is too much of a risk. Too many Christians of a certain type like to ignore their founder and point at the mote in their brother’s eye while ignoring the beam in their own, and accuse occultists of evil intentions toward children. This is why I also can’t have anything to do with youth groups, and why I can’t let myself be put in any situation where I’ll be alone with a child — having nasty accusations flung at you without any basis are par for the course if you’re an occultist, and I can’t risk that. Finally, I heard the phrase “Star’s Reach” in my imagination long before I started working on that book; I had a sense that it was someplace far away, someplace that people would seek and struggle to get to. In retrospect, I could see it as a place where the stars reach down via radio communications, but that’s purely in retrospect; what happened is that the magic of the phrase grabbed me.
Nachtgurke, duly noted, but that tone of frenzied outrage has been overused in recent years…
JH, those articles cover most of what I have to say about the subject. Was there anything specific you were wondering about?
Jennifer, thank you! My current plan is to proceed to William Butler Yeats’s book of occult philosophy, A Vision, but I’m of two minds currently which of the two editions to recommend. Stay tuned!
Leigh, interesting. I’m glad to hear this.
Andy, my favorite Dion Fortune occult novel is The Goat Foot God — it’s not to be missed.
Peter, I’m delighted to hear that they’ve finally noticed. The more energy-literate peakistas back in the day put years of apparently fruitless effort into getting that concept through the yard-thick skulls of the limitless-growth crowd.
Matt, the first is probably the better choice.
Annette, nah, there’s a lot more. What about turquoise? Puce? Heliotrope? Magenta? Bee blue — the ultraviolet color that bees can see and we can’t? 😉
Yavanna, thanks for this. They’re all free for the download on Global Grey:
https://www.globalgreyebooks.com/h-rider-haggard-books.html
“J.L.Mc12, if the social media companies know what they’re doing, they’ll cut Australia out of their service area and shut off every Australian’s access. ”
As an Australian, all I can say is, one can hope…
Christopher L Hope @ 115 “we ought to extend citizenship to Israelis so they’ll have a place to go if needed.”
Oh, really? Why is that, do you think? What makes Israelis more important than any other peoples? Do you expect us to take in all displaced Palestinians as well? In effect, transferring the ME wars to our country.
I have read some of H. Rider Haggard and Elizabeth Goudge. British escapist (Haggard) and light (Goudge) fiction was much in vogue with public library acquisitions staffers in the 1960s into the mid 1970s. Haggard, for me, is the sort of improbable adventure stories one reads as a teenager. I consider Goudge quite enjoyable light reading. For anyone who enjoys British fiction, allow me to recommend Isabel Colgate, and Jane Haddam (or perhaps it is Hallam)
The two famous names here are the sisters, Margaret Drabble and the late A.S. Byatt. I think, personal opinion, Drabble is far the better novelist, if a bit of a Victorian moralist. Byatt was at her best in the short story form.
Closer to home, we have the Canadian, Margaret Atwood, known far and wide for her distopian SF, Handmaid’s Tale, et. al. I think her best so far is The Robber Bride.
@J.L.Mc12 RE : Social media ban.
I completely agree with you on the ipad parenting, I have seen it up close far too many times, the impacts on the children and the flow on impact on parents a few years down the line are very concerning. It might sedate them short term but longer term it becomes pure chaos in all manner of life.
Regardless of that, I do suspect that it would be helpful to give these social media companies need a mighty slap to keep them in shape. But the age restriction bill feels like a major over step and with clean over tones of ulterior motives. Rather than saying they need to control their service, this bill just remove the people from the service or alternative control the people who use it. To continue the slow by steady construction of the digital panopticon. Mind you it would be hilarious if the response is something like Facebook saying “No more facebook for Oz!”.
The problem I have is that it really looks like the governments back door into digital ID’s linked to your internet usage. It has taken 15 years but this is looking like we are near the final step. There is already total surveillance, soon it could be linked directly to the individual. These are the conditions in which free society crumbles in silence.
Every time something like this comes along, online data retention laws for instance, they get exploited astoundingly quickly by those in power and with the risk of those not in power. Think of the most psychotic behaviour to control others and it is only a matter of time until that is what becomes the norm behind the scenes. While they have abandoned the misinformation bill for now, it is only a matter of time until that turns up again but in a fashion they can force through via the “Think of the children!” battering ram.
While this is not the original context it was meant in, it still holds – “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” – Benjamin Franklin.
It is wild however seeing all manner of people from wildly different political spaces coming together over this. sectors of both liberal and labor voters agreeing with The Greens, Pauline Hanson and Bob Katter… I never thought I would see the day!
Yes, there are also lots of others who are trying to justify this through some very weak arguments, I always find in strange when people defend parties not policies. Long term, I suspect the rising tide of the independents is going to get increasingly large come next years election. It has been growing for the past 15 years and only picking up pace.
* This comment will be hidden due to misinformation and not being ID verified *
@Yavanna (#149):
I read a great deal of H. Rider Haggard in my ‘teens and twenties, and I still dip into him from time to time. My mother Edris and her mother Zena both liked his novels a lot, along with Marie Corelli’s best sellers. (Zena even gave both her children names taken from Corelli’s novels, Edris from Ardath and Muriel from Ziska.) It is through my distaff ancestral line that my own first steps in magic and esotericism reached me, beginning with my great-great-grandmother Nellie, her only child, Alice, Alice’s only child, Zena, and my mother. Corelli wrote chiefly with women readers in view, but Haggard for all readers Both authors are well worth reading even today, but each has been badly neglected by scholars (until quite recently).
Haggard has many more great occult novels than just She and the others that revolve around Ayesha. You might like KIng Solomon’s Mines, People of the Mist, and Queen Sheba’s Ring, for starters.
There is an interesting body of scholarly work on Haggard’s occultism by a man whose legal name seems now to be Simon Magus (though I suspect he was given some other name at birth), some of which you can access for free through academia.edu. and elsewhere. In 2022 he published Rider Haggard and the Imperial Occult
Hermetic Discourse and Romantic Contiguity .
Good day sir! I have been reading your blog for a bit now, and am currently going through the Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic which you helped translate, and I must say this is an excellent work. Thank you.
I am a Knights Templar and Freemason, and have some background with the Templar history. In Chapter 15 of that work, which Levi addresses as Black Magic and which the subject of is “The Devil” basically… to paraphrase, you agree with Levi that Baphomet is the Astral Light. You also note that Baphomet was an idol worshipped by the Templars.
My question to you is this: the Baphomet to my understanding was a made up word using the Atbash Cipher to disguise their devotion to Sophia, the Gnostic goddess of Wisdom and the feminine twin of Christ in the trinity, which the church removed in favor of a formless holy ghost, and to whom Sophia was regulated back to Mary as being human and just Christ’s mother.
As the Templars were gnostic, this would be dangerous for them to parade about, and so they disguised Sophia with the cipher to create “Baphomet”.
It may or may not be in conflict with Levi’s ideas of what Baphomet is… though it would be interesting to view the Astral Light / The Force (lol) / the Spirit as the Rosicrucians like to say – as being Sophia… I don’t feel that is accurate. I would love to hear your commentary on this.
Regards
JMG, that’s fantastic to hear! I love Yeats’s poetry, but haven’t read A Vision. I will indeed stay tuned.
Dear Mr. Greer,
After Kamala basically disappeared from the public for three weeks since her defeat, the first video of her speaking appeared a few days ago in which she appeared to be drunkenly rambling to her supporters to “never let anyone take their power away” with bags under her eyes, slurred speech, and slouching in her chair. It’s interesting to note that this video of Kamala publicly humiliating herself by being publicly intoxicated was released shortly after it was revealed that she was considering another run for president in 2028. Do you think the Democrats intentionally set her up to fail in just the same way they intentionally set up Biden to humiliate himself in the debate in June? This would leave the Democrat Party openly without any leader for the next several years, in addition, to the DNC having to lay off 2/3 of its workers, many of whom haven’t paid for months anyway, in a desperate attempt to balance the budget after wasting 2 billion dollars of campaign funds in just 100 days. Would you agree that with no leader and no money and with most of their core demographic groups abandoning them (union members, young black and Hispanic men, Muslims etc.), the Democrats seem to be at their weakest point since Reagan’s re-election landslide victory in 1984?
JMG, Wo Fat is significant to me in another way than the old TV show. My rival for my now wife’s hand in college was a guy from on Old Chinese family in Honolulu. His family had owned a famous Chinese Restaurant in Oahu for several generations. The name of that restaurant was used by the creators of Hawaii 5-0 as the name of the show’s most famous Bad Guy and McGarret’s nemesis, Wo Fat. Initially he had a leg up on me because he had known her since high school. But over time he turned out to be half crazy and manipulative and much drama ensued before she could shake him loose and be with me.
Hey JMG
That never occurred to me, but you are right that they would do that if they felt sufficiently offended and inconvenienced. I have done some more reading and learned that the current government has suddenly passed 30 other bills in quick succession, one of which involves changes to how they deport migrants apparently.
Things have been changing quickly in Australia, and I don’t know what to think About it at all, since some of it is definitely an improvement but some of it is quite suspicious. Did you hear that the government may be wiping 20% of all student debt , for example? Lots of weird and amazing things.
Now I don’t know whose tone of outrage you are referring to, but MY outrage is obviously more than justified 😉
Speaking of the bits I quoted from Yunkaporta – I bought the book after another reader posted something about it here on the blog. Large portions are a pain to read because of the steady mixture of outrage and whining that riddles the whole work. It reads, as if Yunkaporta semi-unconsciously wants other people to embrace a way of living he himself is longing for but for some reason is not capable or bold enough of living. But it does provide some interesting insights and perspectives, anyway. And “Jingle Bells” probably does qualify as the soundtrack of some kind of apocalypse, don’t you think? For a moment I had the scary image of a nightly scene in my mind, a madman sitting on a piano in some winterly landscape, frantically playing and singing Jingle Bells while in the background another Oreshnik strike is raining down.
Also, I’d like to express my condolences to you – I tried to post under your father’s obituary but for some reason it didn’t get through. From a distance it appears a lot of change is underway for you and I hope you’re doing well.
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
@Martin Re: Bring all Israelis to the USA
There is a very entertaining novel called “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” by Michael Chabon that is set in a universe in which the USA settles Jewish folks in a part of Alaska after World War II– You may want to read it. It does a good job of exploring what would happen if the US had done that.
IMHO, this is not the US’s problem to solve, but just for fun, let’s examine the assumptions;
1) Is it the obligation of the USA to save the lives of the residents of Israel? This seems patronistic, at the very least. Why not offer to relocate them to Russia? Russia is in a demographic collapse and needs more young people–if they can avoid sending all the young men to be killed in Ukraine.
2) Israelis and Palestinians are genetically closely related. They have the same ancestry. Also, the Palestinians are generally not welcome in the rest of the Islamic world. Egypt and Lebanon don’t want them. This is likely why the Palestinians have not been relocated for their own safety, though that would be an equally good solution.
3) Another good solution would be for the Palestinians and Israelis to settle their differences and tell everyone else to kiss off. Both sides in this long conflict are being played by external players, and slowly destroyed for foreign agendas.
Another thought experiment–What would it take to have peace in the ME? Suppose that space invaders grind the Dome of the Rock Mosque, the Wailing Wall, and all other religious magnets into powder. They also prevent Jewish folks from taking away Palestinian property, and prevent Palestinian radicals from assassinating Jewish folks. That would go a long way to peace in the Middle East, but I’m not sure even that would do it.
“Karalan, many dreams can unite people. I’d prefer to see people choose ones that have a possibility of coming true. Instead of loading all our hopes on the mirage of space travel, maybe we could build a better world right here.”
Thanks for the response, JMG. My sense is that convincing people of the futility of their dream is a dead end – they won’t simply just turn towards something that doesn’t interest, draw or inspire them, much as we might like them to, and at least some will end up with no dream at all, nothing to believe in, nothing to work for. As long as they’re using their own money (important caveat!), to my mind it’s better for the overall mental health of planet Earth to allow, even encourage them to dream and try.
There are already massive numbers of people trying to build a better world right here – not trying to be snarky, but that project doesn’t seem to be working out all that well either.
“the vast majority of Masons have no clue about the meanings of their rituals and symbolism, but male occultists generally end up in the Craft, and it’s the best venue I know of to make contact with them and get invited to invitation-only esoteric groups.”
That’s what I’d hoped for, but no luck. My lodge appears very much to be a dinner-club-and charity variety. All good men, and worthy, but it’s not what I was looking for, so I’ll be dialling down my involvement. I tried the Societas Rosicrucia in Anglia, but they wouldn’t take me as I’m not a Trinitarian. Perhaps if I move elsewhere, which is looking likely next year, I’ll have better luck.
My sincere condolences on the loss of your father. I lost my father a couple of years ago (self inflicted gunshot wound following vaccine induced paralysis and terminal illness). I’ve only recently started to recover my internal balance (hence my retracted posts). According to Chinese medicine, grief can knot the mind for up to two years.
My condolences to you as well Mr Greer! And my gratitude for this forum you offer and your works and good advice as always!
Another thing from Peter Denk is his prediction our media will put on a world war III “show” – but there won’t be another world war actually.
The reaction to such an idea from the people living in Europe is more dangerous than the actual risk of another world war, says Egon Fischer.
The spirit world deems a direct NATO/Russia confrontation inevitable, he purports, however it does not have to take place in Europe necessarily, could also be Africa.
Indirect confrontation between NATO and loosely BRICS is already seen in countries like Bhurma, if I am correct, and on other places where the new East-West trade route is planned to go.
Peter Denk says there was a hurricane just Milton just above US Centcom, a military base, and the interprets it as a warning of higher powers to our Western leaders, not to escalate warfare.
In general his opinion is higher powers will not let nuclear war or full escalation happen, ever, among them mother Earth who is fed up with human excessive behaviour now and “will react in the upcoming years”
@Chuaquin
Orlov has kept a subscribers only blog these years, commenting on geo-politics and Russia. Lately he is often seen on the youtube show “Dialogue Works” by Nima Alkhorshid, a Persian apparently living in Brazil, working at a University there.
Also here, Orlov comments on geo-politics, particularily the Ukraine conflict of course.
While rabidly anti-western, saying he recommended his children not to make the effort to learn english at all, he publishes books still – but only in English.
I still enjoy his refreshingly different perspective.
The youtube show Dialogue Works by the way, it sometimes has some merit, with several guests such as Larry Johnson, Pepe Escobar, Scott Ritter, Ted Postol and Orlov.
Often times it amounts to nothing but angry ranting (Ritter has a lousy predictions track record) and moralizing against the West, but Ted Postol a physicist from MIT puts some real hard data on the table, for example about the persisting electronic advantage in satellite suveillance the West has against Russia, and Russia’s counter strategies.
He analyses all the missile attacks of the recent time – worthwhile watching or rather as I do, copy the transcript of the video and read what he says.
@Achille
I can feel your pain, me also nearing forty, highly depressed about how my life has been going. Though I’ve learned a great lot in this life, so from the perspective of incarnation as learning, it was successful until here.
I follow basic energetic and spiritual exercises daily, no illusion given to any attainment of mastership, but that already is a great lightening of the burden.
Otherwise I am now more or less recently an adherent of a hinduistic cult (after having ventured into the world of New Age Pop-Spiritualism this year – not recommended)
If I look at my life, what I’d still want to do is some writing.
Otherwise I have learned to sometimes let go of high expectations to myself, and enjoy the virtues of some of the few deeper friendships I have, make it a joyful contest at times to exhilarate the people I meet in my day and be a positive shining light where I can.
The Octagon society lessons our host offers, the spiritual processing of all the memories we have and the accompanying emotions are a great work that I have not yet come to, but this thing is what you can do into old age, our host started remembering past lives that way, and it can only beneficial, it may be the highest form of mastership attainment, of your self.
I have currently not come to THAT unfortunately – besides energetic exercises and focus meditating, I read substantial psychological literature about the processing of old emotional junk, namely Pete Walker’S “the Tao of fully feeling” – highly recommended!
Find joy in the beauty of nature.
Other things like sports still do play a role in my life, but the ephemeral nature of our physical body with peak performance around the age of 25 years lessens my ambition there, the training of the mind on the other hand is a worthy challenge way into old age.
These are my humble recommendations for you, from someone certainly in a similar situation.
All the best to you, Achille!
I must say, since I meet women young and old in my workplace and otherwise,
it is young western women that have an absolute unpalatable personality on average, narcisstic insanity.
And when I hear young western woman talking in the public transport, they are nothing but self.-indulgent, unempathic and quite insane.
This does not concern lower class girls and women, it does concern those hedged and cradled in the center of our wealthy middle class society.
I noticed their repulsiveness in University, especially when I spent some time in Eastern Europe where I saw the contrast of proud, strong minded, educated young women, who never the less held a basic kind of courtesy and respect always.
As well as young women from Turkey and the middle East, who are polite, up to genuinely cordial.
The karmic backlash of this civilizations excesses will be phenomenal, but it will be the now girls and young women riding the wave of this material excess who will pay the most bitter price.
The vanity and wrongdoing of modern men pales in comparison.
Hi John Michael,
Hope you are doing OK and looking after yourself.
I noticed that more than a few readers are calling on the west’s nuclear phallus threat. Honestly, I’m not seeing the risk personally, but maybe that is just me. It’s hard not to notice that as of a few months ago, our official media began kind of telling it like it is over in that European war. You may have missed this: Russia is unleashing record drone attacks on Ukraine with foam decoys and new Shahed warheads.
The fools who decided to off shore manufacturing, are now competing against countries who avoided such bad decisions – and they’re losing. Good leadership means admitting to past mistakes, then rectifying them. I was never a fan of off-shoring manufacturing capabilities and used to work in manufacturing. When I was a kid, most television sets were made down under, my how far we’ve fallen, and yet not realised it.
I dunno what to say, and like the society in your Retrotopia story, the west’s opponents are looking at ways to further reduce costs so as to improve supply. What does ‘overwhelmed’ mean (he says sarcastically) Our current leaders approach to such matters looks like a dead end.
Oh! Thought I’d mention again about climate change – which you were talking about discussing at some point in the future. The storms here are getting more intense. The other morning, almost but not quite, two inches of rain fell in about twenty minutes. I’ve visited the Amazon jungle and that’s how rain fell there. Crazy stuff. Apparently another storm like that may hit tomorrow. Always exciting. Do you get those sorts storms in your part of the world now?
Cheers
Chris
Cheers
Chris
Hi JMG,
Yes, my apologies – I read them after, they are indeed quite comprehensive. I was going to ask more about your past life memories, but I realize you shared them in the comments to your 2017 article too. Thank you again for sharing!
Curt #128:
“Johan Galtung found the USA to be either a dictatorship or disseparating by 2025. Peter Denk predicts this year will be the “1989” of central Europe at least, where the political system disintegrates (Germany by September 2025).”
I’m not an expert for discrediting this people, but I think collapses usually happens at a slow pace, so I think we won’t see cataclysms next year, maybe sign of the times of course…
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J.L.Mc12 # 129: Thank you for your information. I’m very interested in the Australian govt. measures about social media, because my nephew is an addict to social media and videogames, I’m worried about him and his future. And he’s younger than 16! I’d like in my country there would be such as law forbidding certain activities under age of 16…
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Wer # 131: “trump elected a known warmonger to an aide to Ukraine he cannot back down although he might force the EU to spend only it’s money on Ukraine (like let Europe pay for everything”)
Hello Wer, Sincerely I don’t share fully your pessimism about Ukraine war getting fastly into WWIII, but I think also there are motives for worrying. You’re right in this elephant in the room. Trump seems very comfortable with the neocons…We’ll see him on January…
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Achille #135:
I understand you, because myself I have a personality disorder; well it’s not obsesive compulsive disorder, but my disorder has stopping me doing a lot of things, like starting a family, making children and find a stable job. I reccomend you if you have religious beliefs, practising them more deeply (for me, this measure has worked well), and if you don’t have them, read and meditate about stoicism philosophy.
Saludos
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Johnny #101: I’m living in a medium size town in Spain, and in my street every night old fashioned lights are switched on, so we can’t see the sky stars thanks to light pollution. When I go to my father little town, at nights you could see a lot of stars, but you also could watch the big town light, glowing south at some 50 km distance.
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Nachtgurke #140: “here in Germany we started having “Black Friday” only a few years ago. Now they have become “Black Friday Week” or even”
It’s the same s**t in my country. I remember when the Black Fridays fashion started some years ago, and now’s been metastasyed here in Spain.
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Well, I’ve just read the news online, and I’ve found that Disney Channel is going to cease its broadcastings in my country in 2025. Apparently, it isn’t a very important topic, but I think however it’s a sign of the interesting times we are living. According the news (I’ve found them only in spanish ,excuse me), disney channel will start to broadcast in streaming when 2025 starts…
https://www.europafm.com/noticias/tv-cine/que-disney-channel-dejara-emitirse-espana-partir-2025_2024112767470d221258380001ec3b66.html
I think this means that digital media keep on devouring traditional or legacy media. What do you think about this?
Borealbear #139
As to past lives, my experience is that everyone has had at least one or more truly torturous ones. They are not fun to see, but there can be benefits to choosing to stay with the imagery and accept it for exactly what it is. It can be compassion and conscience-building, sometimes even opening up flows of empathy. It can bring insight into certain behaviors in this lifetime. And it can prompt you to realize that you truly are back. Cliché as it may sound, parts of you are truly untouchable, and they have a chance to do their best in this lifetime. You can get a sense of the core self that does not break apart, even after a brutal death. It also makes certain struggles in the here and now feel much easier in comparison.
JMG # 150: “he’s in St. Petersburg and runs some kind of pro-Russian social media venue. I haven’t followed him closely for a while now.”
It’s good to know it. However, it’s also a pity because Orlov (in spite of his love to fast collapses and rampant jingoism) was a smart writer and “eco-doomer”.
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This morning, I’ve just finished reading “Before Collapse”, and well, Ugo Bardi writes well and knows well his job. However, he’s too biased to fast collapse. To “convince” the readers, he cherry-picks some natural and human made sudden disasters; and he misunderstands other historical long time facts, like the fall of Rome or the USSR disintegration. I think he’s contrafactical. Have you read this Bardi book?What do you think about it?
Hail Krampus! Happy Buy Nothing Day!
Greetings JMG,
Which year do you see the US oil production begin its decline?
@JMG
Thank you for indulging my shotgun spread of questions here, and for the well-wishes for a potential HOGD (funny how that ends up the same acronym as the Hermetic GD). I hadn’t thought about asking the DOGD for advice, but I’m glad to hear they’d probably be open to that.
“You may be surprised to hear that I didn’t intend the Ariel Moravec novels to be for the young-adult market! I wrote them for the cozy mystery market.”
Oh, I was aware of that, and it does show clearly in the books themselves, but they also work as YA in a sort of backdoor way, don’t they? I think I first got the idea from another commenter here who described them in that way. In any case, I’m sorry to hear the anti-occultist prejudices are that powerful. Not being alone with children and so on seems like a wise precaution for anyone these days, especially in America, but I’d have thought simply writing a book for them without necessarily interacting with them in “real life” wouldn’t be an issue.
For those of us who’re more concerned about wokeness these days and tend to consider Evangelicalism a spent force, it’s a sobering reminder of how many wild-eyed zealots the US apparently still has, and that they still wield real power in many places, even if they’ve taken some heavy cultural losses since the 2000s. In my country the Christians are completely sidelined, and the Muslims don’t have enough clout (yet?) to impose too many restrictions on the rest of society, but dogmatic materialism is the order of the day. This is also the reason I’ve decided I’d rather not talk about occultism or Heathen-related things here under my real name: all the people in my life are various flavors of hardcore materialists, and I’d rather not deal with their scorn. You certainly have my respect for being so open about being an occultist, especially in such a Christian country.
As for Star’s Reach, appreciate the insight. I’ve also written fiction pieces that grew from a title, so I know the feeling.
@ Clarke aka Gwydion #120
Re. reincarnation
I don’t have any really convincing memories, but then again I’m still early in my occult journey. Recently I did have one dream that felt different, where I had a clear sense of being someone who was both “me” and not at the same time, but I wouldn’t take that as any kind of proof. After reading through the Dolmen Arch, I’ve also realized I used to intuitively do something very similar to a few of the exercises there as a child, which as I understand our host might mean I had some experience with occultism in a previous incarnation, but again, very loose and speculative. Still, I’m happy to be in “wait and see” mode when it comes to past-life memories. If it happens it happens, and if not, that’s fine too.
Re. Gavriel Kay
Yes, I read some of his books a few years back and mostly enjoyed them. Especially the Saranthium (sp?) series, since the Byzantine Empire is such an underused setting, and I liked the main character a lot. His approach to alternate history is fascinating to me too. Basically copy/paste a real historical setting, but transpose it to an alternate world where things are just slightly different, so you can change every detail as you see fit. It gives you most of the depth and heft of a real historical setting, without being burdened with all the baggage and predetermined outcomes of our real history. Personally I’d like to see this method applies to more recent settings too, like, say, the 70s or 80s.
Of course it helps that he generally writes well too. Again, I also loved the idea of this genius mosaic artisan as a main character. It’s a fascinating craft in its own right, and also places him in this interesting middle segment between the elite and commoners, and makes him a very different kind of leading man than the usual warrior and adventurer types. My main complaint with Gavriel Kay is that his plots tend to be very sprawling and a bit meandering for my tastes, but for me the good parts outweighed that. Especially in the Saranthium books.
Goat Foot God is my favorite, too, since I can relate to Hugh Paston, veing of melancholy temperament and a major bumbler in practical matters and human relations, despite one massive difference I just now became aware of in Fortune’s Foursome.
To wit: I immediately saw each leading male character represented, among other things, the range of temperaments/elements; and, like H**** P*****’s 4 Houses, 4 different cultural strains that went into the making of Britain. (Celt, Viking, Norman, Saxon). it now dawned on me just the other day that each of Fortune’s men represented the 4 major classes on 1930s Britain.
Hugh: Investariat, total child of privilege, and stifling from it.
Wilfred: small-town entrepreneur, which was middle-class in his day.
Murchison: impoverished wage class (and full of a seething resentment.)
Malcolm: Professional
Back to Goat-Foot God: I’ve had Pan on my altar since the beginning, and a few years ago had a long lucid dream or half-asleep fantasy which was an initiatory experience which even ended with everybody going back to town and taking up their daily lives again, quietly changed for the better. But, yes, I so understood Hugh, even to our parallel coping strategies – withdraw, or leave. His standing up to his family and devising a clever strategy to get them off his back was his defining moment.
Okay – other comments: I am so looking forward to Carnelian Moon! Also to the next Jerry Shimizu novel.
Wolves were a powerful symbol in Rome. Not just their founding myth, but an annual celebration called “The Lupercalia, taking place in early February. I give you Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lupercalia#:~:text=Lupercalia%2C%20also%20known%20as%20Lupercal,Lupercalia
And I’m keeping track of the several different timelines in each sets of novels: The Three Winters one, thee Weird of Hali one, the Twilight of Learyville one, the Retropia one, and now the Jerry Shimizu one. Fascinating!
@JMG , I have posted here for many years as Tony C and with this email. I had not posted here for a while, and then I see there is another Tony C.
I will post as Tony A from now on.
JMG tells us that he retains some memories from previous incarnations, two of which he claims were spent in England. Well, I’m English, so I was shocked to read that he’d never heard of the ever-popular Rupert the Bear. Obviously there are some severe lapses in his memory, so I’ve decided to write his autobiography, since he clearly is never going to get round to it himself. As a business proposition it has great promise. I’m convinced I’ll be offered a two million pound note for the finished product, after which the limited edition will rise exponentially in value, year after year, until you’ll need to own a bitcoin to be able to afford to buy it.
Alfred Bestall, author of my favourite Rupert Bear stories, apparently based Gaffer Jarge on Mr. Greer himself:
https://scontent.flhr2-3.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.6435-9/131153176_4106976715997369_3765678930823346762_n.jpg?stp=dst-jpg_s851x315_tt6&_nc_cat=101&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=f727a1&_nc_ohc=-c456F0e4VgQ7kNvgHtLruB&_nc_zt=23&_nc_ht=scontent.flhr2-3.fna&_nc_gid=AM9La1WFSWe0BCRCPj0amLM&oh=00_AYCcQ4kM5VSspRt2dKixiufu5edIfV139wcogUXYiPSgoQ&oe=67712A23
– you can see the likeness.
I’ve also spoken to a high-up CIA agent, Jack O’Valley (not his real name), who is convinced that JMG is actually the immortal Count St. Germain. “He’s one of those guys who never seems to age. In fact, he’s looked 60 since he was 12”.
Rumours abound that a JMG look-alike had a wild affair with Betty Boop back in 1930, but our current hero remains tight-lipped about this. I can only hope he’ll approve of my venture. 😉
John, everyone–
I don’t know if anyone else had seen this, but apparently not too far from me, up in Door county, WI, a bunch of grown women gathered on Nov 9th to scream at Lake Michigan in response to the election.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/women-engage-mass-primal-scream-wake-trump-victory-release-our-pain
I stumbled across the story last night (mainly b/c it was somewhat local) and have been attempting to understand the purpose. Personally, I’d be trying to figure what happened and why, but screaming at a large body of water is apparently more useful?
I think I remember you discussing a “demonic hypothosis” and then rejecting it, in the context of a forbidden topic here. Could you direct me to where I would find this discussion?
And happy Thanksgiving.
JMG,
In 2020, you posted a quick summary of Biden’s inauguration astrological chart. Are you planning on doing the same this year? I too felt the ‘clearing of the fog’ we’ve been in since 2020, it feels the heavens united and spoke “Enough Bullshale! There will be a nonradioactive and free future.” Like everything else, there will be challenges but alot can be accomplished without everyone having to drag along 20 PMCs worth of dead weight.
On an energy and environment question, do you think California will finally get off their duff and build some desalination plants? As you know, water in the west is precious and previous short sighted generations sold alot of water rights to Cali and Las Vegas. Here in Oklahoma, we’re lucky we still have ours but my cousins in Colorado constantly complain about the lawns in Denver and Las Vegas draining them dry.
@Kimberly Steele, read your article and enjoyed it very much. Thank you.
JMG,
The reason I ask about California, is because they are very much at risk of not receiving federal funds back to the state for various reasons. This alone might mitigate alot of the craziness we’ve seen like the destruction of dams. Their budgets a total mess.
On the Australian social media ban – I know never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity, but perhaps making it impossible for social media companies to do businesses in Australia is the point, along with rolling out a biometric security system that will find more and more applications as times go on…
Of course, the funniest possible thing Musk could do is provide free Xitter accounts to Australians – smartphones can connect directly to the newer Starlink satellites, and there is little the Australian government can do about that.
Re: social media ban
This is what I would do with my kid, before letting him or her onto the internet. They would have to take a course in setting up a computer from scratch and connecting it to the local network and then onto the internet. The test would be, here’s a bunch of PC parts, put them together, install an OS, configure it and show me a webpage. Without any outside help. That’s the equivalent of long division on paper, I know there’s more braindead ways of connecting to the internet, but I want them to show me how you do it by hand first. Then you can go paw your phone like all the other addicts.
My thinking is, if they can get to that point, ready or not, here they come. But no internet until they can get to that point.
“Christmas a humbug, JMG!” said Bofur. “You don’t mean that, I am sure?”
I have been thinking about our discussion last week about the corporate liberals of DC and how I became the focus of their wrath.
What clarified for me was an editorial column by Hugo Gurdon of the Washington Examiner called “Rage, rage against the dying of the Left.” he discussed the same thing I was experiencing. As a conservative, he has been called the enemy.
He wrote, “Underlying it all is the Left’s intellectual and moral arrogance. During high-stakes political campaigns, that arrogance produces denunciations. Political opponents are labeled fascists, racists, and other disobliging things.”
In other words, conservatives are depraved, greedy, inhumane, selfish, and inexcusable.
What hit me was the whole thing of “only I matter, you do not.” Only my needs and wants are allowed, yours do not. So, voting for Trump to bring down the price of eggs is a no-no since Gay lives are at stake. Never mind the starving people at the food banks or the ones who are begging at the CVS entrance. (Both common occurrences for me.)
In short, I-I-I-I is really what they are telling me. You are just chopped liver.
In a discussion in “First Things,” Liel Leibovitz, a rabbi, writes voting for Trump is a good thing. For one thing, he points out Trump makes a laughing-stock out of the status quo. Proposing to continue in the “cheerful scorn” of “name-calling and internet memes.”
He was taken to task by a letter writer who wrote that Trump was not the lessor of two evils. “It’s a completely a different thing to move further away from reason, logic, and basic human decency, and instead promote reductive polarization. This is a new low in the apologetics of Trumpism.”
Leibovitz replied, “Any dispassionate student of American history, observing the chaos of the previous decade, will emerge with a rather clear picture and a rather clear culprit.
It was the omnivorous machine, controlled by Barack Obama’s Democratic Party but now incorporating everything from our newsrooms to our classrooms to our boardrooms, that spread the wild conspiracy that America’s forty-fifth president was a Russian asset.” He goes on “It was the same machine that harnessed law enforcement agencies to harass and intimidate public servants, and that pursued the flimsiest of legal pretexts to pursue political enemies.” He ends with the denial by the various heads of the intelligence community that Hunter Biden’s laptop was real. In short, we are in Screwtape territory.
Finally, someone said what I was thinking out loud. Obama (who seemed untouchable) was really the person who changed the rules. Trump beat him at his own game.
Now what for Obama? Is he done? Is this machine being dismantled?
On a completely different note.
Killer whales revive 1980s ‘dead salmon on head’ look. Experts are trying to understand exactly why they have reverted back to a trend that fell out of fashion four decades ago.
Maybe, they liked the retro look? Salmon hats, anyone?
“Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer
Mr. Greer in the last thread comment #194, you compare Trump to a battering ram. That is an interesting metaphor. though you did not make explicit your metaphor mirrors the same one Christians cite from scripture Ezekiel 26:9. https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation/a-trump-rally-a-right-wing-cause-and-the-enduring-legacy-of-waco/
no question I thought it was interesting choice on your part. may be interesting if others had not noticed/were not aware of the link.
so open thread – ok i’ll go on Trump’s election. idk about others for me it felt like I was watching a disaster movie with someone where the plot just unfolds to a cascading final blow out. Only and I turn to them and they are in shock like they saw a twist ending, which in turn is the twist ending for me. I am shocked so many are shocked at what we just saw. From the Biden debate to the end run around the primaries to appoint Kamala to the desperate debt incurring moves to pay for celebrity endorsements and on the certainty of a landslide seemed more and more likely from the mid-summer on. The all seem like, it was going great and then at the end for no reason it all went to hell. I’m like wait how are you surprised?
A lot of liberals have worked into such a hatred of Trump they seem incapable of empathy for Trump. I would suggest anyone imagine being in his shoes – and you were in a fight with people and knew that the people fighting against you intended for you to die in prison with your legacy tarnished under hundreds of felonies going down in history as the Capone President. Most people imagine if you were faced with the prospect of spending the rest of their life in prison because a racket of legal cases came down on them. If after you won the cases and instead of dying in prison in disgrace as they intended you were put in a position of power to reprimand the actors and accusers – what would you do?
From that perspective of empathy, some of the calls for Trump to show restraint, turn the other cheek, etc. for the sake of national unity are incomprehensible. At a minimum these people need to be removed from power not out of spite of vengeance, but a sense of duty to the public. Is Trump supposed to think the department of justice won’t start it right back in four years if he does nothing so he can spend his last few in prison for the sake of giving folks warm and fuzzies about being a uniter not a divider?
Princess Cutekitten, re: re-migration
I have a friend from Ghana who, after five years in Sweden (legally, well integrated, he’s swell dude) is about to go back home, taking his Swedish wife and kid with him. They find Europe disheartening, cold, and just too hard a place to live, especially with regards to cost of living, working hours, and regulations.
Re. Elizabeth Goudge – this one, “The White Witch”, is my favourite. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/420181.The_White_Witch
The central character is a healer, and also, in many ways a cultural bridge during the highly polarised period of the novel’s setting, the English Civil Wars, and families divided by religion (Roman Catholic, Anglican, Puritan) and by ethnicity (Gypsy vs English). The central theme is goodness, how to “live” it, what it might look like, and this theme is elaborated in several sub-plots, including an Anglican pastor protecting his church’s statues and rituals from the pronouncements of the local puritan manor lord, the rescue back to the “good” of a local “black witch” through an extraordinary act of sacrifical love, an ordinary love story with a very surprising ending, masses held in secret, occasional hints and glimpses of the unseen come through so much of the writing.
I’ve read what I’ve just written, and think I am a very poor book reviewer. 🙁 I do not know how to improve it. This is why I am a reader, not a writer, I think.
Anyway, I’ve begun to explore other books of hers, and while all are different in their settings and plots, all seem to share these “glimpses and hints” of the unseen coming through them. Also, many of her characters struggle (mostly with themselves) very often to “live the good”, but tolerably often this is a struggle that they win, which is very encouraging to me personally – there is so much out there that mistakenly/misleadingly celebrates people’s descent into the bad.
@Bob in OK
#183 184
Since Im one of the California natives here, I might as well address this.
California is a very large state. It does not have a state wide water system. And, the large scale water piping it has done and proposes to do are very controversial within the state as they take water from lower income more rural regions, ruining the environment and the area, to serve monied interests elsewhere. They also tend to go from Northern California to Southern California, which just adds to those issues, “they” end up with all “our” water. A small current example of why it is perceived like this, a friend of one of my offspring, who is from LA, takes very long showers, very long. This is not done in the part of Northern CA I live in. We provide our own water in this area and work to stay in our water amounts you could say. LA has almost no water. It is all imported from Colorado or Northern CA, mostly from Colorado, and they propose to make a new extremely long and expensive pipeline to take more from Northern CA.
Anyways, most water districts are very small, usually done by city to city, but sometimes larger ones. The terrain is large and there are geographical constraints. So, in my area houses have individual wells, so ground water. 15 minutes downhill of here, the city and towns draw water from a small regional river mostly, with some ground water taken. 45 minutes south of there, there is a very small town on the coast which has a desalination plant. The towns surrounding it get water their own ways, I forget, most likely groundwater wells. They did not have excess to allow development, so that very small town basically did not exist, had a few houses, then a corporation wanted to put a shopping mall there and subsidized the desalination plant so the area could be developed. Desalination is very expensive, and makes pollution that must be dealt with ( the “salt” that is taken out, this is a disposal problem as it is not clean salt that we put on food, and excess minerals like this kill ocean and land areas it gets dumped on)
Anyways, to have any of this done statewide, you can see the issues, why would I want to pay for someone elses water when I still have to provide and pay for my own while in addition to the tax hit, I would end up with environmental degradation in my back yard, no more fishing if you take my river or salted soil or brackish lifeless water if you dump desalination trash ? And, my electric rates would go up in addition to the tax hit to build the desalination plant as we dont make alot of electricity in the state so when alot more is used, rates go up to discourage usage.
As far as the dam that was taken out. That is far Northern California, and I am not up to speed on what the local area thought about it. It certainly had nothing to do with providing water to far off parts of the state, and there is no way anyone would have allowed a new very large pipeline from it to LA if that were even feasible. We could never afford to move water far from that area, and they were not those kinds of large reservoir making dams, they were small dams for local electricity. The fact that they were taken out suggests to me that the costs of maintaining electric production from the remote location wasn’t penciling out in any case, but maybe Im just skeptical that way to think that lack of profits to maintain would be a large part of the Largesse to the small Native American population there.
Data point: Which maybe should go on the COVID blog, though it’s not even COVID. My son-in-law Andrew from Colorado was going to drive me home after Thanksgiving dinner last night, and my daughter Carol handed me an N-95 mask, ordering me to put it on before getting in the car, because her nephew Connor had a cold and his father had it, too. Everyone – Andrew, both of his children, his wife Sarah, and I were masked until we drove up to the front of my building. Then Connor, who had been visibly under the weather all weekend, was the one who walked me to my apartment.
Ironically, Carol herself had COVID, but was handling dishes and food, saying she was still sick but no loner infectious. I feel like I’ve entered an alternate world with different laws of nature.
JMG, Condolences regarding your father’s passing. May you be blessed with strength and comfort.
A thought emerged for me this morning, it seems to me that the Progressive embrace of all the gender and other identity stuff is somehow conflated with the idea of transcendence. As has been mentioned here many times, we each have a higher self, which is our soul (have I got that right?). Progressives would say that is who we really are, so we can ignore nature, it’s an illusion, we can ignore physical existence, we can ignore limits, since we are actually these unlimited spirit beings. As if once we die, we become all powerful, all knowing beings, so just act that way now.
We can surpass and transcend nature and make it our servant. Be whatever we want to be. However, they ignore the fact that we are physically incarnated for perhaps many reasons and thus miss those purposes (lessons?) and fail to “move on?”
If you could provide some thoughts regarding this perspective, I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you for all you do.
WILL1000
Oh yeah, I’m currently reading and enjoying Haatan and look forward to subsequent Ariel books. Also, just read your excellent The Hall of Homeless Gods. FWIW, I vote for more Shimizu or similar. I’ve read most of your fiction and a lot of Dion Fortune’s fiction, so find it difficult to wait.
Just to share: I’ve been reading a series of spy or political intrigue novels by Mick Herron (British) called the Slough House series. Very interesting, entertaining, and LOL funny at times. Summarized from Wikipedia, Herron writes from his experiences while working in the legal department of an employment issues firm. He assumes the Secret Service operates like any other workplace bureaucracy where people are doing quite dull jobs, working with people they don’t like, and a lot of office politics going on. He revels in the inanity of said office politics blighting British bureaucracy.
People make mistakes, fail, then take CYA actions, which lead to subsequent inanities and failures. Sometimes, one or more of the “good guys” die. Characters actually being human. Seems more realistic than other approaches, where all goes according to plan and the main characters never make mistakes. Just thought you and others might appreciate another author pulling back a small portion of the curtain.
Salud,
WILL1000
Christopher L Hope
100% agree. Israel, for all its many faults, is still the only decent country in a 500 mile radius, surrounded by people who want to destroy it and against whom it is obliged to fight bitter and bloody wars. That alone is worth supporting on principle, but more than that, the same people who want to wipe it off the map and commit a (genuine) genocide of its people will turn their attention to Europe and the West if they ever succeed in that goal. Remember, large parts of Europe were under Muslim control once, and some of Islam’s more fanatical followers still regard the Balkans and Al-Andalus (Iberia) as Muslim lands conquered by infidels.
Anyone of any background fighting against radical Islam should be supported including Israel.
@JMG Thank you. I’ll give academia.edu a try. Boy do I know what you mean about academic press prices!
@Tired21 #24 (and anyone else who might be interested in the Lullian Art)
It depends on how much you already know about Llull’s system. I’m going to assume you’re an absolute beginner, so feel free to skip things you already know. This is the process I am using myself.
1. Read The Art of Memory by Frances Yates. It will give you history and context to understand how the Lullian Art fits into memory systems as a whole, and the couple of chapters that are specifically about Llull are a good introduction.
2. Learn discursive meditation as taught by JMG, if you haven’t already (there are detailed instructions in The Druidry Handbook and on his Dreamwidth site). I don’t know if Llull used something similar to discursive meditation, but it is extremely useful for making sense of his system and perfectly compatible with it as far as I can tell.
3. Explore the material at the site JMG linked (https://lullianarts.narpan.net), starting with the translations of Ars Brevis or Ars Generalis Ultima. They cover the same material but the first one is the abbreviated version with just the main concepts.
4. Meditate on each of the first 18 concepts (goodness, greatness, etc), then meditate on each of them combined with each of the 10 questions. Once you have done that, my expectation is that the rest of the system will become more accessible (I’m in the middle of this step myself).
5. Read everything else about Llull you can get your hands on, if you have the money, interest, and stomach for the academic prices. If interlibrary loan is an option, that can help. This is mostly for background information and context. As far as I can tell with my research so far, most academics are not interested in understanding or explaining Llull’s system. I’m not sure that anyone alive really knows all of the intricacies of it. Anthony Bonner is helpful, though. The Art and Logic of Ramon Llull is not a step-by-step guide, but it does have some helpful information about some of the ways the system functions. It’s one of the pricy ones. Knowing Spanish is useful; a lot of the academic work on Llull is of course being done in Spain.
Also read up on medieval philosophy and history to better understand the things that were important to Llull and milieu he was working within.
This is a lot, I know! My personal goal with all this research and study is (a) to learn the system well enough to adapt it to modern issues, and (b) to write a book (or, more likely given the breadth of the subject, books) that makes the system accessible to anyone interested at a reasonable price.
Mr. Greer,
Thank you for your very interesting series of essays on The Nibelung’s Ring and for providing a link and inspiration to read the librettos of The Rhinegold and The Valkyrie. I am very much looking forward to finding out how this story (and allegory) progresses and ends.
On another note I would like to propose that you are putting too much weight on importance of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. I refer to your post “The Nibelung’s Ring: The Later Philosophy”: “(…) Kant showed with ruthless clarity that nearly everything we think we know about the world is secondhand guesswork. (…) As I noted two weeks ago, every philosophical tradition makes this discovery sooner or later. In healthy, mature traditions, after a period of lively debate that shows that, in fact, we really can’t know that much about the universe, philosophers turn their efforts away from grand schemes about the nature of everything and refocus on how to live in a world where the nature of everything is exactly what we can’t know.”
Yes, Kant did show that we can’t know the thing-in-itself. (Especially if it is a material object which goes through the filter of the senses, perhaps not so much if it is a timeless, abstract quality, subject to the exact mechanics of mathematics and logic.) That is, we can’t know it completely, but we can know it up to some large degree. We live in a world which we must know – the penalty for wrong knowledge can be death. If you mistake an abyss for a carpet and step on it, or sulfuric acid for an orange juice and drink it – you die. Thus, lets say, with evolutionary corrective we have come to know our immediate environment to a very high degree, enough to survive and even thrive. For common sense, for all practical purposes – that is sufficient. If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. What it actually, truly is – doesn’t really matter (to anyone but philosophers). Thus, what Kant discovered – the thing-in-itself – is more of a theoretical curiosity than a discovery which shapes the whole cultures. At least, that is how I see it.
Hi John,
Condolences and prayers for you and your father. And thank you again for hosting these.
My question is not just for you, but for the commentariat, if anyone has any resources pertaining to this. I have searched, but found many contradictory sources of information.
I took the *first* moderna vaccine, but not the second. As soon as I’d done it, I realized it was a mistake, it was most certainly not remotely similar to the other vaccines, was claerly harmful just from my body’s reaction, and the doctors were lying. I did not get the second shot, nor did I get any boosters.
My question is: What can be done to reverse the damage? Or more plainly, get this stuff out of me? Is there any detox, supplement, or any other remedy that can help?
I can tell it did damage me, but I am grateful I stopped when I did, because I have a very strong feeling things would have been much worse had I not.
Thank you, and thank you all, for your help.
Matt
@Svea #55 That’s a good tip, thanks! So far all of the articles I’ve been interested in are by authors who are deceased, but I’ll keep it in mind for newer articles.
@Jessy #96 Thank you, I will check out Sci-Hub!
@Connie Barlow #99 Thank you! You know, I used Google Scholar’s case law search frequently for work but hadn’t thought to use the article search. Thanks for the detailed instructions on getting the most out of it. The wikipedia access point was one I’d never heard of before; that sounds potentially useful.
@Meditative Wolfman #112 First of all, great username! Second, thank you for the detailed write-up of how to get access to the Wikipedia Library. That sounds like it may well be worth the effort required.
@Rita #133 I can look into the local institutions, but I only have a couple of small universities and community colleges close by, so I don’t know that they’ll be much use even if they offer community access. Larger universities are all at least an hour’s drive away (and only one of those is in the same state as me; unsure if that would matter).
I’ve saved all of these suggestions for future reference. Thank you, everyone!
They’ve just released a video of the rebuilt interior of Notre Dame Cathedral:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lqFxCzrgD0g
To my relief they seem to have taken a traditional approach to the restoration, with the exception of some regrettable modern bronze furniture, which hopefully will be scuttled before too long. It’s not clear to me yet whether they mean to rebuild the spire.
Re: Australian social media ban,
Of course this is how the digital Id gets implemented, and achieves a high level of participation/compliance.
“How are we all going to prove we are over 16, this is going to be a pain. Providing all my documents.
Don’t worry citizens, your government has your back.
Look here is this shiny new digital Id we had created for your convenience,
the digital Id is “voluntary” unless you want to get on social media, then that is your only way to prove your of age”
Bang – significant majority of Australians are on board.
Add that to the rumours that tax returns won’t be able to filed without them , and there will be near 100% compliance.
Mr Kemble
Dear Mr Archdruid
The international rules based order countries seem to have a strategy of “invade the world, invite the world” (see Steve Sailer). If this is a strategy, why would you not want to keep your citizens who you want to do the invading happy? I write this as The EU wants to send a 100,000 man army into Ukraine to fight Russia. Can any of our European friends advise if your working class is keen to fight in Ukraine so Europe can be a museum for rich Americans?
A second question is about the Trump election and social change. We seem to have lots of change in the past several years, social change like the alphabet movement being normalized, massive immigration bringing cultural change, economic change due to self imposed global warming constraints, endless wars against Russia and Iran (ongoing) with the war against China coming soon, and on and on. Do you think on one level the average person wants a period to adjust to these massive changes? One thing about our elite is they seem to have no reverse gear.
A1
Curt #165: Thank you for your news about D. Orlov. I’m impressed he’s quite active yet…
Bro. and Sir Knight Auticus, like every serious esoteric symbol, Baphomet has many levels, and Lévi only touched on a few of them. I don’t think he was aware of the Atbash interpretation, for example. (I’m pleased to see that that’s getting some recognition among today’s Templars — that’s very promising.) Keep in mind that my commentary on Lévi is focused on explaining what Lévi is talking about, not on introducing my own ideas or those of other traditions with which I may be acquainted; keep in mind that there may also be initiatory obligations involved. ‘Nuf said!
Jennifer, it’s a remarkable book, arguably the most interesting thing Yeats ever wrote. I’ll post more once I’ve made some necessary decisions.
Chad, I don’t think either Biden or Harris was set up to fail. The Democratic establishment has become a victim of its own propaganda — having defined Biden as mentally sharp and Harris talented and capable, the Democrats never considered the possibility that neither one would perform to spec. They’ve been blindsided for more than a decade now by that habit. As for the condition of the party, I’d say your assessment is quite an understatement. The Democratic party hasn’t been in this kind of trouble since 1865.
Clay, ha! So the haole won again. 😉
J.L.Mc12, interesting. I think we’re in for a lot of change, very quickly…
Nachtgurke, thanks for this. Your image of the apocalypse works well — it would make a harrowing scene in a movie, for example. As for me, I’m doing fairly well, all things considered — thank you.
Karalan, so noted. I stated my preference, not what I thought would happen.
Bogatyr, well, I certainly can’t speak to the British Craft; my experience is pretty much entirely American, and even here you sometimes have to look long and hard to find the other esoterically inclined brothers.
Tengu, ouch! My condolences. Yeah, it’s a rough road, isn’t it?
Curt, thanks for this. West Africa in particular is shaping up to be a major flashpoint; once the Ukraine war is over and Europe begins its inevitable rearmament, I expect to see wars there between Europe and Russia, first through proxy forces and then directly.
Chris, thanks — yeah, I’m napping a lot and taking it easy. I’ve also noticed the reversion to realism in the media over Ukraine. As for storms, no, what we’re getting here is just a warmer version of usual; it’ll be interesting to see if we get a second snowless winter (in New England!) this year.
Chuaquin, er, I don’t think about it at all. The travails of the television industry aren’t something I care about, since I haven’t watched TV in my adult life, and I wouldn’t watch Disney if I were paid to do so.
Tony C, depends entirely on how you define “oil.” Most of the production boosts in recent years have been a product of very dubious games with definitions — natural gas condensate and fracking liquids aren’t “oil” by any normal definition, but they’re lumped together with oil to make the numbers look better. As those run short, something else will be found to pad things out. Since net energy is dropping steadily — the article Peter Wilson posted above is worth reading —
https://jpt.spe.org/plummeting-energy-return-on-investment-of-oil-and-the-impact-on-global-energy-landscape.
— the actual benefit we get from further production is much less than its face value, but that’s been true for quite a while now.
BorealBear, the US is a very weird place, and one of the common mistakes Europeans make is thinking that we’re just a sort of younger cousin of Europe. Au contraire, we’ve got a very thin surface layer of pseudo-European culture over the top of something deep and strange, and the surface layer is breaking up. I like to say that America doesn’t actually exist yet; our entire history so far is the gestation period of a society that won’t be born for several centuries more — and when it is born, my guess is that the rest of the world will stare in horror as though Cthulhu himself was rising from the sea.
No, I don’t mean that as a joke. It’s an intriguing place to be incarnate just now.
Patricia M, I hadn’t caught that until now either, but you’re square on target. A class analysis of Fortune’s novels generally would be interesting. As far as timelines, hmm! Other than a common theme of decline, do you notice anything in particular?
Batstrel, funny. I admit I’m feeling a bit like Gaffer Jarge just now. As for the Comte, you really have to be careful about believing CIA disinformatsiya, you know!
David BTL, yes, I read about that. My first reaction was complete befuddlement — did they think that Donald Trump was a classic Japanese kaiju born from the waters of the lake or something? — but then it made sense. It’s a primal scream indeed: the rage of a bunch of overgrown infants shrieking at Momma Universe because it won’t give them exactly what they want on demand. That is to say, it comes from a immature level of mental development where terms like “useful” don’t apply yet, and thus indicates a profound state of emotional regression, the sort of thing you’d expect to see in the midst of a serious psychotic break. I hope these people can get some help.
Phutatorius, it’s somewhere back on the Covid open posts. Since it turned out to be incorrect, fortunately for us all, I haven’t kept the references.
BobinOK, I’ve already got the chart printed out. Before I get to it, though, I plan on doing a retrospective of Biden’s inaugural chart. The method of interpretation I used worked fairly well; there were some places where my readings faltered — notably, I thought the two great outbursts of violence indicated by the chart would be domestic; as it turned out, they were the Russo-Ukrainian and Israeli-Palestinian wars — but those are opportunities for learning. As for California, er, where are they going to get the energy, or the money? I expect California to be the 21st century’s rust belt, and SF and LA to become urban basket cases like Detroit and Baltimore.
Bofur, au contraire. Not my religion, not my holiday. In my childhood it was always a letdown; Sara had much worse experiences with it — her mother was mentally ill — and so as Druids, we had a much quieter and more pleasant solstice ceremony without the trappings of Greedmas four days beforehand. I plan on continuing the custom.
Neptunesdolphins, that seems about right. It’s the same mentality as the women David BTL wrote about up the comment stack a bit, who got together to scream their rage and hatred at Lake Michigan for letting Donald Trump exist. Toxic levels of infantile narcissism, in essence. Leibovitz is quite correct about Trump and Obama, of course — does anyone happen to know where the Obamas are now, btw? — and the killer whale thing is unnerving. Is it their way of supporting the GOP by some strange cetacean sorcery?
Eagle Fang, you have to admit, Schopenhauer could write.
Jstn, no, that wasn’t the metaphor I had in mind and I’m mystified that you think it was. Were you of the opinion that that’s the only time in history a battering ram has ever been used? I meant it in its general sense. If a political establishment has raised walls around itself, a battering ram is a good way to punch through those, and a blunt instrument like Trump works well in that context. As for the calls for “restraint,” keep in mind that some of the people who are behind these calls arguably committed serious felonies in an attempt to hold onto power; if the laws are enforced against them, the best they can hope for is losing all hope of regaining power, many may spend the rest of their lives in prison, and — if foreign powers are involved in any of this — there’s a very real possibility that some may be hanged for treason. You’d better believe that they’re going to plead for mercy under the circumstances!
Scotlyn, many thanks for this. That’s a perfectly helpful book review, from my perspective, so thank you.
Patricia M, you have indeed. The laws of nature have been replaced by laws of collective psychopathology.
Will1000, I think you’re onto something important there. The Progressive rejection of nature is what Rudolf Steiner described as Luciferic evil — the kind that starts by saying “The universe isn’t good enough for me” and proceeds to act as though everything in the cosmos must cater to its imperial ego. It’s spiritual pride taken to a self-defeating extreme, and yes, it embodies a total failure to learn the lessons of incarnation. The Slough House series sounds intriguing — I may make some time for it.
Eyrie, obviously we disagree about the importance of Kant’s discoveries. It’s trivial to make a distinction between the ding an sich and what we can know about it, and it’s also the foundation of all philosophy everywhere — in the Western tradition it comes in with the earliest Presocratics. What Kant did was to show with precise logic just how much of our world, including such basic elements as space and time, are conditions of our consciousness rather than part of the world “out there.” Your comments about survival can be turned back the other way with a simple Darwinian argument: we have exactly those perceptions that will enable us to survive in the usual range of human environments, but that’s all — and we know by way of scientific inference that there’s an immense amount going on around us all the time that we never notice, because it doesn’t bear directly on our survival in the short term. Still, it’s fair to say that every philosophy is an account of how the universe looks from one particular point of view, and if you don’t find Kant’s point of view congenial, why, de gustibus non disputandum est.
Matt, that’s a subject discussed regularly over on my Covid open posts; if you go there, let people know you’re a newcomer, and pose that question, you’ll be pointed to tested protocols for dealing with vaccine damage.
Kevin, thanks for this.
A1, you have to remember that the elite classes have forgotten that their own lower classes are human beings with opinions and feelings of their own. To the elites, the rest of the population is an abstraction. It has never entered their darkest dreams that they can’t conjure that 100,000-man army into being just because they want it. Nor has it occurred to them that the Russians can simply shrug, declare a general mobilization, expand their army by a million men, invite a quarter million North Korean soldiers to join the fun, and do to the EU precisely what they did to the Third Reich. (And that’s exactly what the Russians will do, of course. Anyone who doesn’t realize that knows nothing about Russian history and culture.)
The elite classes of Europe live in a dreamworld of infantile fantasy in which nothing can ever really go wrong for them. They are unable to realize that they could lose — and that, of course, is the most profound of their many vulnerabilities. As for the average person in Europe and elsewhere, they have no interest in any of those changes — and once again, the elites have forgotten that all the rest of the population has to do is stop obeying, and the whole rickety pyramid of elite power will come crashing down. We are potentially very, very close to seeing the scenes of 1989 in eastern Europe reenacted in the West.
Curt @#166:
I agree about young Western women. This problem was a long time in the making.
I had the misfortune to come of age just as 2nd-wave feminism got off the ground. That, along with my Asperger’s, was a one-two “double whammy” which effectively made it impossible for me to find a wife. Hence, I am an old bachelor pushing 70 now.
Nowadays, I counsel young men to avoid them, and look abroad for their happiness. Like you, I have noticed that there are plenty of strong, educated, capable women in other parts of the world, who are nonetheless gracious and feminine.
In my own Serbian Orthodox parish, I can tell you that Serbian wives are quite phenomenal. I know many doctors and lawyers among them, who do very well professionally, and who also do a superior job as homemakers. Far from being resentful about it, they seem to take pride in their ability to keep so many balls successfully juggled in the air! I think that any Anglo woman who attempted what these women do, would melt down in short order!
JMG, “that wasn’t the metaphor I had in mind and I’m mystified that you think it was” – to help dispel the mystery my thinking was that you chose that metaphor of battering ram either knowing or not knowing the Christian context. My next thought was, you would probably know since it relates both to Trump and spiritual context generally. In a similar, you could have used a number of other metaphors. so my thought was just toward the one you chose. e.g., wrecking ball. well, hopefully that link is interesting – at least a coincidence that you aligned on that point.
Owen @185:
“The test would be, here’s a bunch of PC parts, put them together, install an OS, configure it and show me a webpage. Without any outside help. That’s the equivalent of long division on paper, I know there’s more braindead ways of connecting to the internet, but I want them to show me how you do it by hand first. Then you can go paw your phone like all the other addicts.”
That reminds me of how my father got his first car. My grandfather (who was a machinist), went to the junk yard, got a pile of parts, and told my Dad “As soon you as you put all this together into a working car, and start the ignition, it’s all yours!”
>a bunch of grown women gathered on Nov 9th to scream
There’s only one question I have. Was their hair blue?
I’ve concluded that it’s irrelevant what they’re screaming about or why they’re screaming – they have some deep overpowering need to scream. It’s probably for the best that they are screaming and not doing something else. On occasion, I do wonder about the blue hair. Is it the hair dye that makes them scream or is it the screaming that makes their hair blue? They seem to be correlated.
JMG,
“Were you of the opinion that that’s the only time in history a battering ram has ever been used?” i am confused by this question. my point was that it’s a common metaphor. wrecking ball. sledgehammer. etc. and just curious if aligning on the same metaphor for Trump as Christian Trump’s supporters to break up the deep state was more significant than coincidence.
>Kamala publicly humiliating herself by being publicly intoxicated was released shortly after it was revealed that she was considering another run for president in 2028. Do you think the Democrats intentionally set her up to fail
That’s an interesting observation. And it has happened before – “Big Jim” Folsom. Although as I understand it, she had quite the drinking problem before all this happened, they just covered it up for us. As I understand it, she’s quite abusive to her underlings, perhaps they all got together to retaliate? Or maybe they just shrugged their shoulders and said “D*mned if we do, d*mned if we don’t, ship it”. It’s dangerous when being unemployed looks more attractive than continuing to work for someone.
I would also claim Biden’s debate was his “Big Jim” Folsom moment – when he failed so badly on camera, his political career was permanently over. He wasn’t drunk though, that was the sad part.
Oddly enough, it’s impossible to find a video of Big Jim Folsom slurring his way through the campaign speech on TV. Try it, see if you can find the recording of it. If you do, let me know.
“one of the common mistakes Europeans make is thinking that we’re just a sort of younger cousin of Europe”
Guilty as charged, I supposed, even if I do know there’s a deep vein of non-European weirdness in the US too. Still, the fact that we use your language as a lingua franca and the saturation bombardment of American pop culture probably makes us feel like we’re more similar than we actually are.
“We’ve got a very thin surface layer of pseudo-European culture over the top of something deep and strange”
To an extent it goes both ways, though. I often feel like we here in Europe have a surface layer of pseudo-American culture on top of something deeper and…maybe not “strange” in the same way, but at least older and more…rooted, maybe? Unlike the North American and Australian diaspora, we’re still in the same place we’ve been since the Neolithic, and I’m sure that makes a difference in some way. You could also make a case that we up here on the fringes of continental Europe only had a surface layer of European culture to begin with.
@ Andy T. #171
Thanks for this. I suppose there’s some sense to that, even if it’s a meager comfort. Or a very hard-won perspective, if you prefer, but maybe that’s the whole point. See: “the universe doesn’t care about our comfort”, I know.
@ Sam Salzman #198
There’s a few points I’d like to make here, if I may, as someone who used to be moderately pro-Isreal until last year. First: I’d say they lost any claim to that “decent country” label after the events of 2023. Yes, they were attacked first, and those attacks were indeed awful. Still, they’re by far the most powerful and wealthy part in the conflict, and their reaction has been so far outside the bounds of any reasonable proportionality that they can’t claim any sort of moral high ground in my opinion.
Second, what does “support” actually mean? It’s possible to be a fierce critic of their military response even while supporting its existence as a state. Trying to conflate these is a dishonest rhetorical sleight of hand IMO. (Not saying you’re necessarily doing that, but some people are)
And third, I object to the “500 mile” thing. Sure, many of those countries are pretty bad when it comes to pluralism and religious freedom, but AFAIK (I’m bad with American units) Turkey is within 500 miles. Even if things have taken a turn for the authoritarian under Erdogan, I think it’s fair to call Turkey a fairly decent country, and probably the most pluralistic Muslim one.
(Bonus fourth: Since we’re on a JMG blog and all, it’s only fair to point out it’s likely the whole region will become borderline uninhabitable due to drought anyway, regardless of who wins the conflict)
@Patricia M #177 re: Fortune’s Novels and Class
Thanks for pointing this out! I just wrapped up The Sea Priestess the other night, which I picked up right after Goat-Foot God, and what I thought I had noticed about class so far was that the lead men were “upper class,” since both have the money and time to monkey around with fancy approaches to magic and worship. I hadn’t made the connection that Wilfred would be more middle-class, what with the large(ish) house and servants and what not, but that’s likely my 20th/21st century Americanness blocking my understanding of early 20th century Britain. And now that I think about it, most of the bankrolling for their experiments came from Morgan, of course.
Anyhow, looking forward to the others, but I might be taking a break to catch up on some of our host’s books and/or his recommendations (I’m still split on whether to pick up Davy or the “side” books from “The Weird of Hali” next).
Cheers,
Jeff
Jstn, I don’t naturally think in Christian metaphors, you know, since that’s not my religion!
BorealBear, Arnold Toynbee argued that Scandinavia and the adjacent parts of northern Europe properly belonged to their own civilizational sphere, which was overrun and absorbed by the rapid expansion of the Christian civilization of western Europe. So you can definitely make a case for that! The rootedness is certainly an issue; it seems to me that one of the reasons America doesn’t exist yet is that its current population hasn’t been here long enough.
Jeff (if I may), I’d definitely recommend Davy, especially if you haven’t read any of Edgar Pangborn’s work yet. He’s a treat not to be missed.
About the timelines – I did notice how different each one is from the other. In “Three Winters,” you caught each character in a time out of time – between crashes, as it were. In the Weird of Hali, we basically got a play-by-play description on a 20-year chunk of the downslope, and how individuals reacted to it.
In Jerry’s world, what remains of the U.S. government is a going concern and, by and large, a decent one; Shoreside is the old pre-sanitized Las Vegas-in-the-sand, and we see the changeover from warlord to king expressed more succinctly by one of S.M. Stirling’s Emberverse characters, another gangster turned successful ruler: “He was smart enough to realize that if you were the government, you sheared the sheep instead of slaughtering them.” Big Goro and his predecessors weren’t; Jim Nakano, like Ruth Taira, was. That sort of change is when “barbarian” becomes “feudalism.” I downloaded a bit of Stirling, well, not fanfic, but fan-written analysis/Early period Medieval history called “The Darkness of the Womb.,” about that process. The link no longer works, but I can copy it to a Word file for you if you like.
BTW, thanks for your comment on The Masks In The Car.
I guess it’s a matter of what parts of the downslope you’re looking at, and the size of the window you’re looking through, and the attitudes of the viewpoint characters.
@Sam Salzman and Christopher L Hope.
I am afraid your views on Israel’s prospects are a bit out of date. As Noam Chomsky has said , ” Israel is the forward operating base of the American Empire,” not a normal country. It will exist only has long as the American Empire holds sway in the world.
I think the end of the empire, and thus Israel are much much closer than many within the echo chamber believe. When the Ukraine war comes to its inevitable end, which will likely result in the dissolution of Nato, the empire will be down to the last fumes in its tank.
For all practical purposes ( if delusion did not hold sway through out most of the west) the empire was over the day Putin demonstrated the Oresnik missile. As Dmitry Orlov opined in his recent interview with Dialogue Works, this new weapon, combined with Russia’s superior anti-missile systems means that the Russians can strike any US military base in the world with no fear of meaningful non-nuclear retaliation.
Tommorow Putin could call up Netanyahu and give him one day to implement a 2 state solution ( Russia and China’s preferred option). If he refuses then the next day a dozen Oresnik’s would be on their way to Israel. The first couple would take out all Israel’s nuclear weapons, and missiles. The rest would wipe out all Israeli airbases, leaving Israel to be overrun by its neighbors. About 5 minute before the first missile hit a call would be placed to the US, explaining that there were a couple more targeting any Carrier Groups in the region and it would be best to go home.
The Russians could deliver a dozen S400 anti-aircraft systems to Lebanon by plane and there is nothing Israel or the US could do about it.
If tommorow a giant flotilla Russian and Chinese landing craft filled with aid, protected by Chinese and Russian war ships, landed on the beaches of Gaza there would also be nothing the Israeli’s could do.
The Israel’s have lost themselves any friends in the world outside the U.S. and its lackys, and the rising power that solves this grim situation will find themselves atop the new geopolitical order.
BobInOk @#182
RE California and desalination plants, we do have desalination plants. Treated wastewater from treatment plants is run through banks of reverse osmosis (RO) membranes to remove salts. In addition, groundwater (GW) in some areas has rather high levels of dissolved solids (salts). This GW is pumped and run through the RO units as well. The high levels of salts in GW is a legacy of dairy and agricultural operations, as well as discharges and infiltration from earlier limited treatment of wastewater (i.e., only primary treatment before discharge) prior to adoption of current treatment standards. Desalinating seawater is a stupid idea as it has much higher salt content, so more intense treatment is required. Also, it would need to be pumped uphill for use. Better to treat moderately contaminated water that is already uphill. Also, Las Vegas does have restrictions on water use, lawns, etc.
As for how long we can keep this (desalination) up, I expect that JMG is correct. However, all our PMC (of all political colors, shades, and hues) here still believe in Progress and infinite growth, we can have our cake and eat for now and ever more, easy-peasy, we have the technology, we will conquer and manage nature, etc., etc., etc. Conservation gets very little attention, some lip service now and then, but bringing it up is political suicide for any politician.
WILL1000 (southern Californian and state water quality bureaucrat)
IndustrialAlchemy – if you have a public university anywhere near you, go to their library and ask to use their public access terminals. The computer will allow you to access academic journal databases, where you can search for articles that require a subscription. Because you’re gaining access through the university’s subscription, you should be able to email full-text articles to yourself from journal sites, or download onto the computer to email. I do this periodically at my local University of California campus.
Michael Martin – there’s still the not-minor problem that the actual location of Israel matters a great deal to the Jewish experience of Judaism.
Dear John (and commentariat):
What do you think of the JFK assassination? Do you think the conspiracy theories are true? I’ve been reading about it, definitely suspicious.
JMG, understood – hence I thought it was an interesting coincidence or similarity in your expression! sorry I did not mean to imply you were a Christian.
Matthew #201
You might want to check out the FLCCC Alliance if you haven’t yet. They publish specific protocols for complications from the shots. They also have a directory of doctors who are on board.
I hope you find relief and stability soon.
In response to Clay @130
Your comment reminded me of something that as a younger person who missed the 70’s always struck me as odd. The transformation of the Cold War from being about “Capitalism vs Communism” to being a nationalist struggle (with internationalist pretensions on both sides) between the US and then-Soviet Union. A striking pop culture example of this is in the 1984 film Red Dawn where it is explicitly stated that the only real ally the US has in its struggle with the Warsaw Pact is Communist China. A dramatic 180 from the Hawaii-5-0 days!
The thing that always amazes me is how totally on board the self identified American “conservatives” seemingly were about this. Was there any pushback to this from the right or was it just totally accepted as normal that Communist China was now a “partner to the free world”?
The only explanation I can think of is the neoconservative movement’s origins in and sympathies to anti-Soviet Marxism, of which China was the trailblazer by the 1970’s. But even that doesn’t explain why the rank and file went along with it.
Cheers,
JZ
Hi JMG,
I’m glad to read that you are doing okay, all things considered. What a year you have endured! May 2025 be much, much happier.
Recently I found myself working way too hard to come up with a new username for a new email service, until I remembered the ever-entertaining Cosmic Oom name generator you and Sara put together years ago, featured on each Magic Monday post to this day.
I just want to say thanks for that! I am delighted with my shiny new (secret!) username.
OtterGirl
@JMG #207
Could you elaborate a little on your comment below?
“our entire history so far is the gestation period of a society that won’t be born for several centuries more — and when it is born, my guess is that the rest of the world will stare in horror as though Cthulhu himself was rising from the sea.”
I enjoyed your series of posts concerning the future North American (and emerging Russian) civilization though I don’t remember anything in them that points to what I’m interpreting as a bleak future. The “G Rated” version on how I feel is that there is enough horror to stare at right now……..
My guess based upon how BorealBear phrased his question is you are referencing an extreme or very strange religious component to that future civilization? Something to make the current eschatological fetish look tame or something, not necessarily bad but irreconcilable with other civilization’s ways of thought?
Based upon the recommendation in this thread I decided to look into Fortune’s The Goat-foot God.
The preface states that Dion Fortune’s works “…were written a long time ago and since then a great deal more has been understood and realized so that many of the ideas then expressed are not now necessarily acceptable. ”
This is from a 1989 edition published and copyrighted by the Society of the Inner Light which was founded by Fortune. Anyone know of any schism or repudiation of some of the founder’s ideas? A quick look at their web page (https://innerlight.org.uk/) doesn’t reveal any evidence of statements concerning “not necessarily acceptable” ideas. Interesting.
Hello John,
What ideas do you have about the Age of Capricorn? Some people suggest it will be a time where the “sheep will be separated from the goats”. We are already seeing an increasing divide between Masters and Slaves in the Aquarian approach – whether it be the Floyd Riots, or Farmers strikes in the UK it exhausts some libidinal impulse but power shifts upwards. Obviously it would return to Aries, but what are your thoughts? Could it be a rapture like event? Two species of Man develop? …or a part of Humanity separating themselves through some means (space travel?)
Thanks,
Planasthai
The Other Owen (#211) – Whenever I see someone walk by with hair dyed any un-natural color for their age, and think to myself: “They have a lot more confidence in the safety of the chemical/cosmetic industry than I do.” I guess I was in middle-school when I read a book about the history of industrial chemistry (if that seems precocious, my father taught high-school chemistry), and it included a chapter on toxic hair treatments. All very much in the past, ahem, of course. But when you look at what can be legally put into our FOOD, how much safety testing do you think goes into hair dye? You may be onto something, with bidirectional causality.
Jstn #212, speaking as a heartland Christian, I wouldn’t assume that because I referred to Trump as a wrecking ball in 2016, and JMG called him a battering ram, that we agreed on everything. The significance is just that that’s what Trump IS, no matter who you are. He wrecked the Republicans then, he’s wrecking the Democrats now, if you like. Get rid of him, strike him down, and he will become even more powerful in death. My takeaway is just that different people of diverse backgrounds are seeing the exact same thing and from different perspectives. Normally that’s a confirmation of reality. But there’s always holdouts for the deep state sucker rally
Re: the Nôtre Dame restoration, as previously mentioned –
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XBPyZcOUybI&pp=ygUQI3RoZW1lZGlha25pZ2h0cw%3D%3D
It looks like they already rebuilt the spire after all, to judge by external shots. I’m pleasantly surprised.
Patricia M, good. I tried to make each of them very distinct, to try to widen the range of imaginable futures.
Enjoyer, I’ve assumed ever since I got old enough to read the official version that I would never know what actually happened that day in Dallas. I’ve never seen any point in going beyond that.
OtterGirl, thanks for this. Sara and I had a lot of fun creating the original version —
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/86183.html
— and that brought back some good memories.
Scotty, oh, I’m not saying it’ll be bleak. I’m saying that it will be utterly incomprehensible, and therefore frightening, to other civilizations. America already does that to a lot of people elsewhere anyway. As for Dion Fortune, no, it’s nothing like that — she uses expressions that were common in her day but have become unacceptable in ours, and her portrayal of relations between the sexes are accurate for the 1930s and therefore somewhat scandalous now.
Planasthai, that’s not my take at all. Capricorn is the most relentlessly practical of the Earth signs. As the age of Aquarius dawns, we’re seeing a shift from the emotionally based religious ideologies of Pisces to the first stirrings of intellectual spirituality and a focus on the imagination; in two thousand years that approach will have run its course, and people will be eager to brush aside all that useless chatter and actually get to work. Aquarius, being ruled by Uranus, is also a sign of individual liberty and giddy individuality — the whole masters-and-slaves dynamic is another Piscean hangover — and by the time the Caprican age dawns, that impulse will also be exhausted and people will be ready to unite around practical action. Expect our species to carry out unbelievably vast engineering projects during that era, and to tackle issues of practical politics with relentless energy; expect also a great deal of narrow-mindedness and a lot of economic hardship, since the age will be ruled by old cold Saturn, the lord of poverty and hard limits.
Hey JMG
Leaving the odd changes in Australia for now, I thought I would mention an Artist that I rather like, and whose work may interest you.
William Robinson is one of the most famous artists in the region of Brisbane, and there are a few Art galleries in the city that display his artwork, which usually consist of very detailed depictions of Australian Rainforest, painted with iridescent paint and strangely warped backgrounds which make one think that it is a psychedelic apprehension of nature. I am quite fond of them, and it is with good reason that he is a minor celebrity in my city due to them.
https://www.wrgallery.qut.edu.au/
At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.
* * *
This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
May Charlie the cat, who has been extremely sick and vomiting but whose owners can’t afford an expensive vet visit, be blessed, protected, and healed.
May Scotlyn’s friend Fiona, who has been in hospital since early October with what is a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, be blessed and healed, and encouraged in ways that help her to maintain a positive mental and spiritual outlook.
May Annette have a successful resolution for her kidney stones, and a safe and easy surgery to remove the big one blocking her left kidney.
May Peter Evans in California, who has been diagnosed with colon cancer, be completely healed with ease, and make a rapid and total recovery.
May baby Gigi, who may be suffering from side effects of medication prescribed during pregnancy, be healed, strengthened and blessed. May her big brother Francis also be blessed and remain in excellent health.
May May Jennifer and Josiah, their daughter Joanna, and their unborn daughter be protected from all harmful and malicious influences, and may any connection to malign entities or hostile thought forms or projections be broken and their influence banished.
May Ram, who is facing major challenges both legal and emotional with a divorce and child custody dispute, be blessed with the clarity of thought, positive energy, and the inner strength to continue to improve the situation.
May FJay peacefully birth a healthy baby at home with her loved ones. May her postpartum period be restful and full of love and support. May her older child feel surrounded by her love as he adapts to life as a big brother and may her marriage be strengthened during this time.
May all living things who have suffered as a consequence of Hurricanes Helene and Milton be blessed, comforted, and healed.
May Kevin, his sister Cynthia, and their elderly mother Dianne have a positive change in their fortunes which allows them to find affordable housing and a better life.
May Tyler’s partner Monika and newborn baby Isabella both be blessed with good health.
May The Dilettante Polymath’s eye heal and vision return quickly and permanantly, and may both his retinas stay attached.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery to treat it.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, be healed of throat cancer.
May Kyle’s friend Amanda, who though in her early thirties is undergoing various difficult treatments for brain cancer, make a full recovery; and may her body and spirit heal with grace.
Lp9’s hometown, East Palestine, Ohio, for the safety and welfare of their people, animals and all living beings in and around East Palestine, and to improve the natural environment there to the benefit of all.
* * *
Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
JMG, I’m sorry to hear of your father’s passing. My condolences.
I read the short comment you made last week regarding prayers for your father and for yourself at this time, but I had difficulty interpreting whether or not either case ought to be considered a “prayer request” per se. So I think I’ll just ask explicitly: would you like me to include something on the Ecosophia Prayer List for your father, and/or for you?
Received your new science fiction book, Journey Star. Am on page 68. Well written. It strongly reminds me of the science fiction written by Ursula K. Le Guin which in my books is high praise. Can be read stand alone, but reading the book that preceded it The Fires of Shalsa is good idea for maximum understanding.
With the new presidency I am predicting more than just a political shift. I think we will see the same kind of cultural shift in music, fashion, etc. that happened after the election of Reagan in 1980. For those not around then, almost overnight disco disappeared to be replaced with new wave, punk, etc. while the loud polyester clothes of the 70’s gave way to urban cowboy outfits, women’s suits at the office and grunge.
I am certainly not qualified to predict what this cultural shift will be, but I will guess that Woke culture will be the Disco of our era. This is happening already with the dramatic release of three high profile commercials dramatically illustrating the shift. First the Jaguar commercial with no car in view and a crew of androgynous actors dressed like Teletubbies, mouthing bland slogans like ” Copy Nothing”. This commercial was so hated by all that it may sink the brand.
It was followed by a Volvo commercial harkening in the coming of a new era. The Commercial featured traditional Scandinavian looking family gushing of the coming of a new baby and being saved by a Volvo. Then more unexpected was Apples new commercial for a new set of earbuds that double as hearing aids. This one centered around a white family at Christmas and the middle aged dads joy at being able to hear his daughter playing the guitar she got as a present under the traditional Christmas tree. These last two commercials have already gotten a huge following of people watching them on you tube and reportedly crying.
This is something of a game changer as we have seen backlash to woke adds, but not huge corporations putting their money in to the opposite before.
Data point: “Cat Ladies” go upscale.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-the-cat-lady-aesthetic-became-cool?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
To laugh? To cry? A long way from Phauz and her alley cats.
@JMG ” Our entire history so far is the gestation period of a society that won’t be born for several centuries more — and when it is born, my guess is that the rest of the world will stare in horror as though Cthulhu himself was rising from the sea. ”
I think the US has been generating lots of heavy karma to stay on top of the world. I don’t think the world will stare in more horror than what it saw of the British or French or Chinese (or Japanese ) history .
There has been lots of love too – 0
Batstrel,
I don’t want to put words in JMG’s mouth or make claims for any of the others posted here. But as someone who also has past-life memories, here’s what I’ve come to believe:
These lives we live teach us things, each in their own way. I am far enough along in the process now to get a sense – still just a sense – of the universal lessons that this realm of existence is meant to teach us. But karma is also real and must be dealt with… and there are no shortcuts.
To respond with terror to this realization is understandable. But I find more relief in it, myself. I can rest secure in the knowledge that universal justice exists – so universal, it even applies to me! 🙂 And I can let go of whatever crimes or sins are committed against me in this incarnation, because I know that those who commit them will experience exactly the pain I have suffered in turn, and in that knowledge, I can find empathy for them. And perhaps more importantly, I am reminded to redirect my energy into avoiding committing my own crimes or sins. I control that, after all, unlike what others choose to do. And that is what I will be held responsible for.
Reading a selection of your comments, I notice your mention of a deep and abiding fear. I have come to believe that whenever someone reports an unshakeable life problem of this sort, they are living in karma. A past incarnation may have been in a position of power over another individual in which they deliberately stoked their fear, to a detriment which in this incarnation, you likely understand very personally. You say your mother is “not who you would have chosen.” Perhaps you did have a ‘choice’ – as in, whether to experience this karma now or later, and you bit the bullet! Your deeper understanding and engagement with this fear could complete the ‘lesson’, granting you knowledge which you would express by breaking the cycle, and not passing this fear on to those in your life you hold power over in turn.
What is the point of suffering? It’s a question that is difficult to answer, especially when you’re right in the middle of it. Based on my experiences, I’ve chosen to meet the challenge that suffering offers by seeing it as teaching me something my soul need to know. Feeling the deep history of my own soul, and remembering the past lessons it has learned (something which it seems is common for those who have been around the block a few times by now), I know that I will be able to carry forth what I’ve learned so painstakingly, build on it, and eventually move on to… whatever is next. I don’t know what it is going to be, but I am doing my damnedest to be prepared!
I wish you the best of luck with whatever path you choose in life, and hope that taking time to contemplate reincarnation today provided/provides you with peace.
Hello JMG,
Here in Devon, UK, I have just become a Parish Councillor. Unfortunately, there seems to be no chance of obtaining free concert tickets or clothing – Brits at least will know what I mean – while £3.50 plus the salary will get me a latte. At my first meeting earlier this month I was delegated to assist in preparing an Emergency Action Plan for the parish – population about 1500 – which is apparently now Best Practice for local councils. I soon came across a National Risk Register produced by the UK government last year, outlining what it believed to be the most serious risks facing the UK. Apart from those associated with weather, flooding and of course another pandemic, two of the most significant and impactful were widespread failure of the national electricity system due to physical attack or cyber attack, and failure of national gas supply infrastructure for the same reasons. This surprised me as I presume most people in the UK, until very recently, would never have considered such things could happen outside of total war.
Many readers here will have noticed that in the last week or two there have been rumours and allegations that Russia is engaged in disruptive hybrid warfare in Europe in particular. This has now broken into the MSM, with the chief of MI6 alleging that the recent spate of disruptions and apparent accidents across Europe, has been instigated by Russia. I had previously mentioned the government’s Prepare website which popped up a few months ago, so I wonder if more serious attacks of this type are on the cards if Russia gets further annoyed by Western arms supply to Ukraine.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/11/30/russia-secret-war-invasion-of-europe/
https://prepare.campaign.gov.uk/get-prepared-for-emergencies/
JMG #247 @West Africa in particular is shaping up to be a major flashpoint; once the Ukraine war is over and Europe begins its inevitable rearmament, I expect to see wars there between Europe and Russia, first through proxy forces and then directly..”
You’re right, though perhaps for once a little behind the times. Those proxy wars have already begun, with Russian forces – the “musicians” – reported to have suffered casualties at the hands of Tuareg jihadis/separatists who were trained by Ukrainians (nothing to do at home, lads?) who de facto must have been facilitated by NATO. Much more probably going on behind the scenes that’s not being reported.
Ukrainians are also reported to have been training the jihadis currently assaulting Aleppo in Syria. Israel is supposedly looking at recognising Somaliland, breakaway republic of northern Somalia, if it can get a military base there, just across the mouth of the Red Sea from Yemen. I hope the Somalilanders will have the sense to turn down that particular bargain.
What I can’t help wondering is whether China, knowing that it’s still in US & NATO sights, might decide to deploy peace-keeping / anti-jihadi forces in either Africa or Syria, knowing that many of those extremists ultimately plan on visiting Xinjiang, just as Russia knows they want to revisit the Caucasus,
So yes, things will not be resolved with Ukraine’s imminent and inevitable collapse, and West Africa may well get spicy.
What’s everyone’s thoughts on the investment in Geothermal energy? Its viability and its impact on the energy crisis that we are currently experiencing?
https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Geothermal-Energy/Government-Funding-Fuels-Geothermal-Expansion.html
What is interesting is how Divine Providence has saved Trump with the timely tilting of his head away from the trajectory of the bullet. Only piercing his right ear in the process. Just those few moments could have altered history forever.
Except providence didn’t spare the man behind him. So this helps us to confirm that the attempt on his life was all too real.
Likewise I also notice that he and Bashar Al Assad has Plot Armor because of fact they are the Pivotal figures.
JMG #207:
“West Africa in particular is shaping up to be a major flashpoint; once the Ukraine war is over and Europe begins its inevitable rearmament, I expect to see wars there between Europe and Russia, first through proxy forces and then directly.”
Poor African people! 🙁
Regarding the Rogan/Andressen podcast
Here is a 9 min clip which contains info on the tech folks switching over to support Trump.
https://x.com/Austen/status/1861638586573169043
Sounds like some meeting in DC scared them big time. Also de-banking.
Johm, everybody here knows that you’re a long time writer, who has been published year after year. I have some questions about you aas writer: Do you have often any creative mental block? In these cases, what do you do for going beyond them? Do you have any advice for starters, new writers, about that problem?
Clay Dennis (#218) – re: Oreshnik missile. While I don’t have any credible evidence to prove that it is not a wonder-weapon to ensure Russian supremacy, I have read alternate takes (e.g.: http://www.reuters.com/graphics/UKRAINE-CRISIS/RUSSIA-MISSILE/gdpzknajgvw/) which seem entirely plausible to me. In case the link doesn’t link, Western analysts quoted by Reuters say that it’s an old design for an Intermediate Range (nuclear-armed) Ballistic Missile, without the nuclear warheads. Yes, it’s hypersonic, but all IRBM and ICBM designs are during the re-entry phase. We may never know how much damage this attack did, but I think that if Oreshnik were going to “change the game”, we’d have heard more interest in negotiation from the Ukrainians by now. One pundit claims that it’s “underwhelming”, and asks whether Putin’s aware but exaggerating, or that he’s being deceived (again) by his own military.
@Chuaquin
“I’m not an expert for discrediting this people, but I think collapses usually happens at a slow pace”
Peter Denk refers to 1989, fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the German Democratic Republic political system.
He remarks how the intellectuals and party members back then were utterly clueless and celebrated the 40th anniversary of their socialism, firmly believed in its longevity.
The media were more and more obviously off by the mark and carried on fairy tale hours,
but the broad mass of the population was already enraged.
Since you have mentioned Orlov yourself, I cherish especially his personal account and general history description of the collapse of the Soviet Union political system and the wild years of the 1990s in Russia.
This is what is referred to as “disintegration”, not the collapse of a civilization as such, that spans longer times, and the “before” and “after” is much more radically different than what we are talking here.
@Michael Martin
Thanks for your reply!
Indeed, we live in a decadent society with all its features, those that make
people with a deeper curiosity in life desperate.
Being bad at playing the decadent game has the disadvantage of being excluded and belittled to us, and maybe the advantage of laughing in the faces of the decadent when their game goes bad and they themselves are now the desperate ones.
Better even of course, as you say, to escape the decadence entirely.
Not easy unfortunately, and not getting easier currently as material wealth declines.
We will see where that’s headed, sad as it is.
I have thought of the Orthodox community too, but never found into it. Now I have participated a few times in the Hindu temple – here I find a pleasant absence of decadence, and a solid code of respect and humility.
Isn’t that one of the biggest tragedies with our decadent society: you approach them with respect and humility and they spit on your head!
I know other cultures are not so and more sane, little am I surprised about the rage and anger of many turks in the 90s here in Austria (and more so Germany), appalled by this lack of honor.
So what should you do? Become an insufferable actor yourself, a snake personality,
or live according to your ethics and pay the price of exclusion?
I guess lives like yours and mine aren’t meant to be funny here, full of lessons though,
maybe a purgatory of the soul the lose all enthusiasm for blind pleasuring for once and all…
All the best to you also, Mr. Martin!
>“Cat Ladies” go upscale.
This era, is the Golden Age of Catkind. Cats will meow and purr about this era for centuries to come. They’ve come a long way from the barn, chasing mice.
Since this is open post week I was going to write about Alan Moore’s, Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, a book I’ve waited a decade for. However, It’s 300 pages and I’m only halfway through and the subject of karma came up.
So for what it’s worth I thought I’d mention some things I’ve stumbled across in the last few years.
I know this comes as no surprise to JMG, but it still startles me on a regular basis* that we appear to be living in a reality where the magic is both a real and potent force, even on a very practical and mundane level. I can personally attest to that. With a certain amount of study an individual has access to an array of techniques that can be used for personal gain, charity, or to wreak absolute havoc in the lives of others. My experience of this has been that results manifest in the form of outrageously unlikely events that subsequently go on to have a huge impact. I can trace at least two earth shattering global examples in this last year alone and I’ve certainly experienced a few personally.
Also, once I was alerted to it as a serious concept I’ve been able to watch the work of karma in the actions of others, bad behaviour seems to inevitably rebound on the perpetrator. It’s not at all difficult to spot if you are looking for it. JMG has regularly mentioned the raspberry jam effect on this blog. it certainly seems plausible to me that doing something that’s basically horrible to someone else is going to invite the inevitable karmic rebound independently from the methods you use.
To put this in concrete terms, I have a deeply annoying neighbour. He’s at least mildly mentally ill, he regularly causes trouble in the neighborhood, he’s the kind of person who performatively flies the Union Jack, but upside down. As it happens I believe it’s perfectly feasible to invisibly cause a series of terrible happenstances in his life that would effectively force him to move away, possibly worse. Of course events like that would impact his long suffering partner and other entirely innocent people.
Of course I’m not going to do it. I certainly don’t want a series of nasty coincides interfering (or worse) with my life. In any case I believe karma will have its way sooner rather than later without anyone so much as lighting a candle.
As things stand, even as we speak, there are any number of people capable of acting as I’ve described, I have met one or two, I read the work of several. Without the constraints imposed by karma on them the world descends into chaos. Um, even more chaos. The delayed impact of karma probably means we have to deal with more chaos than we might.
Oddly enough, one of the keys to making progress seems to be a regular meditative practice and one of the outcomes of regular meditative practice is that people become detached and less focused on circumstances such as the behavour of others. So I believe there is a self limiting effect as well.
* This Stuff Works! I know it’s declasse to go on about it. But I retain my sense of wonder and delight.
The highly self-regarding – cough – elites that purport to run things can be both hilarious and infuriating such as with their various reactions to the capital T Triumph of Trump. But not everything they do to enrage or amuse is on the macro level. Sometimes it’s local and relatively small scale but in the power to annoy it is truly impressive.
In this city, not too long ago, our betters set up a committee specially dedicated to pi**ing people off. It was to approve or not approve applications from homeowners for front pad parking. Seems that the good people on said committee were turning down applications for no good reason. When the matter made it to the local press the journalists found that the committee members had made it their mission to save the environment ie they wanted to discourage automobile use.
Further investigation revealed that… drum roll please …. the committee members themselves had front pad parking. Why? Because they had cars. But you already guessed that.
Car for me but not for thee.
I don’t know if anyone in the comment section made note of this already but did you see Trump and his entourage walk into Madison Square Gardens for the UFC fights a couple weeks ago?
It was a surprise visit. It was something, truly Roman, the conquering emperor entering the arena, the roar of the crowd, the battered champion bowing and paying homage and handing the Imperator his championship belt.
Getting down amid the sweating masses keeps them onside.
@Mary Bennet re: 152
No, I don’t think we should take in displaced Gazans. There is a reason Egypt won’t take them, Lebanon won’t take them, Jordan won’t take them, etc. They have a toxic culture (if it can be called a culture). As Dennis Prager points out, the essenced of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict is this – one side wants the other side dead. Nether Israel nor the USA can negotiate with that mind-set, let alone incorporate it into our own society. Here and there we see some small evidence that the avg. Palestinian knows the Hamas is responsible for Palestinian suffering, not Israel. There is hope for transformation but it will take a couple generations.
Wer here
I never said you can be wrong JMG but, the situation in the West is so crazy right now, those people are acting like they are crazy going to Ukraine will win this war to claiming that nuclear threat is the only response to Russian operation whatever it name is. Also I have a response to Letherchuck here.
When I saw you were quoting Reuters i just rolled my eyes REUTERS claimed that Russian economy will collapse in thee weeks in 2022 back in the day and that Putin has cancer and is insane etc.
Right now the atmosphere in Poland is more somber the idea that Ukraine will collapse once (thanks to the media pandering stories like reuters beliving that Ukraine will inevitably win and that Russia will collapse next week run out of money, oil, weapons etc) unthinkable is looking more like reality. Ukrainian women had been marring Polish men in droves meaning that they are now eligable for Polish citizenship and most likely (given that they more more favored that other groups of foreginers will get it) and young men are leaving to Germany or openly proclaiming that they are not leaving.
Polish Ministry of education is struggling because tens of thousands of Ukrainians at highscholl age are arriving in the country right now (mostly likely based on claim that Us declared that Ukrainians age 18 should be drafted in a hurry) “So much for fighting spirit and Ukrainian patriotism” I wouldn’t be surprised that a fraction of Ukrainian population exists only in the besieged country.
You probably noticed me being centered on the topic of Ukraine well that damned mess is happening just outside the border the country where i live so not so far away especially for drones and missiles.
I don’t want to come off as cruel but Poland has giant problems (south a disaster zone, inflation, most expensive power in Europe,crime etc) WE CANNOT DEAL WITH MILLIONS OF SUDDEN ARRIVALS HERE we have so many problems of our own….. German is buying less and less of our produce and that is a disaster for potentialy 2 million employed poles.
The reality of what has ocured is different than what the babbons in Reuters and New York Times said to us for over 2 years and they are still insisting it here.
Reminds me of a post about year 1989 in Germany and about the population being angry while the media continue to rant on..
@info #243 This company https://www.quaise.energy/ says it has a technology that will considerably speed up and cheapen drilling kilometers down so hot rock for geothermal energy can be accessed anywhere not just where hot rock happens to be close to the surface as in Iceland. They plan to drill beneath a decommissioned fossil fueled electricity generating plant in New York State and repower it for generation using 24/7 geothermal energy.. This would supposedly show if successful that any coal powered or natural gas powered plant could be retrofitted to geothermal. Endless power 24/7, no CO2 emissions, what’s not to like, bears watching to see if it would work as hoped or to see if devils manifest in the details – maybe there will be unforeseen negative responses from this new novel human activity deep in the earth? Gaia may not like it.
@Ecosophy Enjoyer (#221), JMG (#232) on JFK’s assassination:
I was a senior in college when it happened, living off-campus in a small rented room with no TV access. I didn’t hear about it till late afternoon the following day; but after that I kept up with the news every third day or so. Soon an investigating commission was set up under the chairmanship of the highly respected Supreme Court justice, Earl Warren; eventually it issued a report of its findings.
And here is the kicker: the Warren Commission then ordered the complete and total destruction of all the evidence it had looked at, so that no one could ever revisit its findings. That stunk to high heaven! To my mind it meant (1) that the Commission’s published findings were not trustworthy, and (2) that whatever had really happened would have earth-shaking consequences if it ever became publicly known.
At the time I supposed that meant that the assassination had been carried out with the knowledge and consent of the USSR, or by an agent of it gone rogue. I remember those years well, and I can assure everyone here that if the commission findings had blamed the USSR for JFK’s assassination, the USA would have been absolutely compelled by popular outrage to launch a full-scale nuclear attack on the USSR, no matter what the consequences for the future of humanity. (Popular outrage really does work like that!)
Now that I am older and have heard and seen more of what our own intelligence services have done since the 1930s, and how independently they have always acted from our elected government officials, I have added a second possibility to my original one: that JFK’s assassination was carried out by the CIA, or by rogue elements within it. Either option would have had earth-shaking consequences.
Back in the day I trusted our own government agencies more than I do now. My decades at Brown University, an institution massively funded by “spook money” back then, with a few colleagues who had very close relations with high-level CIA folk, gave me a second education on how our government really works behind the public scenery. Smoke and mirrors are us! Nowadays, even if the next President were to release some purported “classified assassination files,” I would not trust them in the slightest. The Warren Commission really did order the evidence completely destroyed way back then, and I have heard enough to know that even the CIA does not always secretly preserve hard evidence of its own doings and deliberations.)
JMG,
You know, if you ever wanted to do another fiction anthology, I think it would be really cool to put out a call for realistic science fiction stories whose theme is “A Future Astrological Age.” What will the Age of Capricorn look like? What about the Age of Leo? For that matter, how might things look the next time the Age of Pisces comes round again, in another 24,000 years or so?
@Christopher L Hope.
2006 called and it wants its Hasbara talking points back. As to Palestinian culture. The late world traveler and chef Anthony Bourdain once said, “Today, nearly everything is made in China. Except for courage. Courage is made in Palestine.”
I don’t agree that Israel will only exist for the duration of the American empire. 165 countries recognize Israel. World opinion is decidedly in support of Israel’s right to exist. It’s not true that Israel has lost any friends outside the US., thouugh Israel should be wary of fair weather friends. If Israel can become self sufficient in weapons production they may be better off w/o American medling – the constant calls for ceasefire under threat of withholding need materiel support may become a thing of the past. Also several ME states regularly engage in trade with Israel even while refusing to recognize it. Sometimes actions speak louder than words. These states know they benefit from Israel’s existence more than it’s absence. Time will tell which of us are correct but I am hopeful that Israel will continue long after the American empire crumbles.
JMG, Re: 256 I should have addressed that to Clay Dennis re: 218
J.L.Mc12, thanks for this. It’s always heartening to know that there are still artists who remember that art is supposed to be, you know, beautiful, and who can paint an image of something that looks like its subject and not like a dog’s breakfast or the random scrawls of a demented politician.
Quin, it was not a request, just a giving permission to those who wished to do so. But thank you.
BeardTree, thank you for this! LeGuin was in fact a major influence on my two Eridan novels — she inspired the very close attention to planetary and human ecology in both books and to the anthropology of the cannibal Outrunners in the second. She also inspired me to take the Outrunners, who are an unseen threat on the edges of the story in the first novel, and make them central to the second.
Clay, I’ve seen stills from the Jaguar commercial, and it fascinated me. It’s as though, like so much of Hollywood, they decided to go out of their way to alienate as many people as possible. (I suppose from one perspective the nomination of Kamala Harris could be seen as another move in the same direction.) I don’t greatly care about shifts in music and fashion — the stuff I like will never come into vogue anyway — but I hope we can see a window of opportunity in which alternatives to the mental monoculture of the recent past might be able to get a hearing.
Patricia M, if Vogue has gotten around to glorifying it, stick a fork in it — it’s dead.
Tony C, of course. Much of the next 500 years will be taken up clearing that away.
Robert Morgan, hmm! I’m glad to hear this. Your country is extremely vulnerable to supply interruptions of electricity and natural gas, and its aggressive and frankly clueless foreign policy gives quite a range of foreign actors good reason to want to encourage such things to happen, Having a working plan in mind might save a lot of lives.
Bogatyr, oh, I’m not talking about EU-backed proxy militias sparring with Russian mercenaries. I’m talking about EU regular military units, possibly not even sheep-dipped as volunteers, going at it against Russian regular military units in similar condition. You’ll have read of the way Germany, Italy, and Russia all used the Spanish Civil War as a testing ground for technologies and tactics, complete with significant regular military involvement. That’s what I’m expecting.
Info, like most renewable energy technologies, there’s a practical core that’s viable in niche markets and specific geographical areas, and a vast amount of handwaving and hoopla trying to apply it where it makes no economic sense. Without specifics, it’s impossible to give a thumbs up or thumbs down. As for Trump, yeah, that was kind of definitive!
Chuaquin, no argument there. I suspect, though, that it’ll be through these wars that a new Sahelian nation or federation will take shape and become a significant regional power, possibly absorbing all West Africa. That’s the normal dynamic in the region. As for writer’s block, I covered that here:
https://www.ecosophia.net/writing-as-microcosm-2-a-door-will-open/
Andy, I’ll look forward to your discussion of Moore’s work when you’re ready. As for TSW et al., you bet it does — and plenty of people, to say nothing of big advertising firms, are using it night and day already. It astounds me that so many people are comfortable blundering along like animate punching bags, serenely convinced that nothing of the sort can affect them.
Smith, that’s just classic. I may have to borrow that for a post, you know.
Wer, I don’t blame you for being focused on Ukraine! As you note, it’s right next door to you. What a mess to be next to…
Steve T, unfortunately I no longer have a publisher that will bring out small-run specialty projects like that.
Clay and Christopher, um, I think the two of you are talking past each other at this point and I’d like to ask for a moratorium on the subject of Israel for the rest of this open post. Thank you.
Info (#243) re: Geothermal energy. The article that you link doesn’t say anything about suitable geology for geothermal utility-scale energy generation being scarce, nor the management of minerals extracted from the rock by the water loop. I imagine that the toxic seepage from mines wouldn’t be much different, but I don’t have anything more to contribute than you can read at Wikipedia.
There is, however, a big lie at the center of residential-scale geothermal heat pump proposals, which is that the ground temperature is constant, regardless of the useful heat drawn from it during the winter, or the excess heat dumped into it during the summer. Depending on the depth of the system, ground-water flow, and the number and placement of other geothermal systems, a user can experience reduced efficiency due to the change in underground temperature. (I had to dig into some serious academic research to verify this finding.) The excess heat pumped into the ground during the summer might actually improve the efficiency of the winter heat extraction, but not if the flow of groundwater carries the heat away. It may warm your neighbors, or just a nearby river.
RE: Northern California Water
The dams on the Klamath River were pretty useless. They were primarily for generating power, and they did precious little of that. Mostly they just blocked a lot of salmon spawning habitat and created toxic algae blooms in the summer that caused problems (like fish kills) all the way downstream. When they came up for FERC relicensing it was clear it just wasn’t worth it to keep them. It’s been amazing and encouraging to see how fast the salmon have returned to the newly available spawning grounds!
As for the rest of our water, you must understand that California is a HUGE state. We often have plenty of water when the rest of the state is suffering from terrible drought. The statewide restrictions really rankle. Needless to say, southern California has been plotting for years how to get our water from up here to down there. The problem is it’s just really far away, and there are huge mountains in the way would need to be pumped over. It’s too expensive and impractical. Not unlike desalination.
Reply to BorealBear #176 and Mr. JMG #207 – Re: True American Culture
I like the way you characterized American culture Mr. JMG. The idea that European culture is a thin crust placed upon the top of whatever real culture we have here in the United States of America paints a very clear picture.
I have been thinking about this idea recently. I have been reading Spengler’s Decline of the West over the past few months to help myself understand the Faustian-derivative culture which lies on the crust of American culture. The further I have read, the more convinced I am that the United States of America is in the early stages of cultural development.
I cannot say where or what the true American culture will look like. I suspect there will be carryover tendencies from the Fautian-European, similar to how Spengler theorizes the emergent Russian culture will evolve. I also suspect that the land and spirits of America will play a great part in founding this culture. I can imagine a future where a resurgent trickster god plays a hand in the part of the emergent culture. I also suspect a close relationship to nature, derivative from Native American tradition.
I would appreciate feedback on my hypothesis!
~mrdobner
To JMG and Robert Mathiesen on the JFK assassination:
To JMG:
Yeah, as entertaining as the conspiracies are, there’s no way to know the real story. I wonder if anything new will ever come out.
To Robert Mathiesen:
Yes, the Warren Commission is definitely fishy. I don’t believe the official story at all. Could’ve been the USSR, or the Cubans, or the CIA, or the Mafia. A lot of people had reasons to want JFK’s head to explode that day. There’s no way to know for sure.
A couple interesting things
First, I received the annual mailed info sheet from my power company, PGandE, which is the geographically and maybe customer largest electricity provider in California. The 2023 power mix they utilized was 53.4% Nuclear, 32.8% renewable, and 13.8% hydro. This is considered green now as Nuclear is considered carbon free. I am not sure where they are getting that much Nuclear. We do buy a lot of out of state generated power, which is part of that mix. Could that be it ? Is it accounting with the other western states in our grid interconnections to meet California mandates ? We take credit for Nuclear, they take credit for natural gas as they are not under state mandates ? What ever the case, I am shocked by the Nuclear emphasis. California imports about 1/3 of the electricity we use, that is a fact. PG and E did send out that power mix statement. But, other sources tell me that California still has lots of natural gas fired plants for electricity.
I hope we are at peak wokeness. I had no idea until last week that Thanksgiving was under attack. I was at a place of business one would think, A county employee, manager of our ,,,Recovery, or emergency preparedness… who mostly works at home, so I drove to the persons home office during business hours to sign a form. It was a week before Thanksgiving, and I was vehemently told that she ” does not celebrate holocaust” in reference to the holiday. I dont get out much, so this was a first for me. There was also irony there as this was a person in power over me and my neighbors vis. money and help with fire recovery efforts, so a person in a power position putting down a cultural tradition very important to my people…. SO, I mentioned this at Thanksgiving dinner with a couple of my woke immersed PMC offspring. First, I was told that this viewpoint was much more common in the area. Second, they are too immersed to agree totally that this was as out of line as I thought it was given that myself and my community have so much financially held by this one person that we cant say anything back….. But, one did say something, ” … yeah, you should have asked her, well in that case, if you could make an appointment with her next Thursday as she would certainly be working …” I again said, that is my point, we cant tease or argue with her about it, that is the whole position of power thing I thought all you woke ones go on about……
We had a lovely dinner, I hope you all did too.
Folks interested in the disconnected reality of Green technology and the switch from fossil fuels to all electric might be interested in this report out of Finland on the little hiccup of peak metals. https://tupa.gtk.fi/julkaisu/bulletin/bt_416.pdf
From the abstract: “Michaux, S. P. 2024. Estimation of the quantity of metals to phase out fossil fuels in a full system replacement, compared to mineral resources. …
“…The task to phase out fossil fuels is now at hand. Most studies and publications to date focus on
why fossil fuels should be phased out. This study presents the physical requirements in terms of
required non-fossil fuel industrial capacity, to completely phase out fossil fuels, and maintain the
existing industrial ecosystem. The existing industrial ecosystem dependency on fossil fuels was
mapped by fuel (oil, gas, and coal) and by industrial application. Data were collected globally for
fossil fuel consumption, physical activity, and industrial actions for the year 2018….
“…It was shown that both 2019 global mine production, 2022 global reserve estimates, 2022 mineral
resources, and estimates of undersea resources, were manifestly inadequate for meeting projected
demand for copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and vanadium.”
It has some really spiffy graphs, too.
Dr. Bhattacharya, Donald Trump, Tulsi Gabbard, J.D. Vance, Elon Musk, Robert Kennedy, Vivek Ramasay and others – what a collection! Compare that to what a George Bush, Mitt Romney, John McCain type of Republican would have gathered together for a team. – dreariness! What is happening is strangely wonderful and yes, frightening to some., but not to me. The weakness to me is the blind spot concerning the need to aim to live within ecological limits – a fifty year re-engineering project details of which are hard to accept for many and therefore not politically tenable. But in time hard limits will force us there over the next 100 years or so.
JMG #263:
” I suspect, though, that it’ll be through these wars that a new Sahelian nation or federation will take shape and become a significant regional power, possibly absorbing all West Africa. That’s the normal dynamic in the region. ”
A new power 100% African. It looks like possible when the EU leaves that zone. I agree.
Thank you, John, for the link about writing!
JMG, I just got a chance to read the ” Journal of Petroleum Engineers” article you linked to. While I totally agree with the articles premise that the EROI for all forms of Petroleum is dropping rapidly I found several aspects of the article to be a bit ridiculous.
The first is that the study of Energy Return on Energy Invested is some kind of new metric that the petroleum industry is just discovering. This of course is nonsense as I was introduced to it in my intro to engineering and intro thermodynamics classes back in 1979. It has been widely accepted and respected in the peak oil movement since the early 2000’s.
The other is that the reason we have to be concerned is not so we can consider downsizing our energy use, but so that we can hasten our transition to the next regime of clean, cheap, abundant energy that is just on the horizon, if only we will focus our attention on it.
My 2 cents is that EROI is much worse than they admit. One of the reasons for that is a very important part of EROI calculations is the life span of the tight oil well after it has been drilled and fracked. I think the lifespan of these shale wells is very exaggerated, and a real reckoning of how quickly they peter out would effect EROI greatly.
Also I think that EROI effects society at large much more significantly than just its effects on the profit and viability of the oil industry. It has hidden costs beyond the costs of petroleum as energy is siphoned off to keep the oil flowing while the energy available to rebuild infrastructure, grow food , and manufacture products is dwindling in a sneaky way. Show up to most people as inflation or civic failure.
Ahem. Apparently my earlier comment wasn’t visible enough. Because the conversation earlier in this thread about Israel descended, in the usual manner, into people talking past each other, I’ve drawn a hard line under all discussion of that bellicose little Middle Eastern country and its interactions with its neighbors, for the duration of this open post. Any attempt to post something further on the subject will be deleted.
Mrdobner, that’s very much my theory on the matter. I’ve expanded on it in some detail in this post —
https://www.ecosophia.net/america-and-russia-tamanous-and-sobornost/
Enjoyer, oh, doubtless plenty will come out, and none of it will be any more certain or definite than all the things that have come out already.
Atmospheric, every time I think wokeness has reached a peak, somebody climbs higher up Mount Absurdity. Still, here’s hoping.
Temporaryreality, thanks for this! Bit by bit, despite every effort to ignore it, reality makes its voice heard.
BeardTree, back in 2005 a study was released — I’d have to go look up the details — which argued, on the basis of quite a bit of evidence and logic, that any project intended to help humanity live within ecological limits would have to begin at least 20 years before the most important of those limits, the peak of world conventional petroleum production, was reached. Ahem — that peak arrived in 2005. It’s been almost twenty years since then. So it’s too late for a reengineering project; the remaining options we have are (a) frantic local and individual aspects to deal with the emerging crisis all around us, and (b) keeping our eyes closed and pretending that nothing’s wrong until we slam face first into the future. The first seems more sensible to me, but I’m in the minority these days.
Chuaquin, you’re most welcome.
Clay, oh, granted. I was delighted that they even brought up the issue and took it seriously; going further, to grasp the fact that it means the end of progress and the decline and fall of industrial civilization, would frankly be too much to expect anywhere other than out here on the far fringes.
John,
How do authors typically plan for what will happen to their work after they pass? What are your plans, if any? I wouldn’t mind being able to purchase a several phonebook sized Greeronomicons that contain everything you’ve ever wrote.
I hope this isn’t a rude question!
The folks wondering at what social media bans for children that must be verified by the social media companies might look like might find the pornography bans for children that must be verified by the pornography companies enlightening.
Several US states have enacted such bans, and the pornography companies promptly decided it was preferable to not provide their product in those states at all rather than deal with collecting identity information. I do not think this was a security matter: these companies deal in folks’ financial information all the time. My suspicion is that they believed that their consumers in those states would lobby their governments to eliminate the requirement. I suppose the hard core users have found work-arounds that portray themselves as located in other jurisdictions, however, no one is likely to write their state representatives and senators and demand that the ban on children accessing pornography be rescinded. It is very interesting that access to minors appears to be more valuable to those companies then access to adult users is.
Beardtree @ 270, You referred to “the blind spot concerning the need to aim to live within ecological limits”.
Or, forgive my cynicism, there might be no blind spot. There might instead be a cold determination to get what we can while the getting is good. And to get Our Side into positions of authority before civil society falls apart.
Someone mentioned You tube shorts above. I would remind folks that some of the world’s greatest artists have been miniaturists. Benvenuto Cellini comes to mind. American classic songs resemble Haiku in their brevity and concentrated emotion. I Left My Heart in San Francisco lasts under three minutes. Maria Kim stretches it out to 5 because she includes an instrumental part for her string band. An opera composer gets from 1-3 hours to tell a story, a song writer has to do it in under 5 minutes.
I have been thinking that if African countries were to amalgamate, they would become world powers. They would have manpower enough to defend themselves and could develop their own resources for the benefit of their own populations.
Anacyclosis, American history, and the Fourth Turning scheme of things: after re-reading “Decline & Fall.”
The cycle of Dictatorship – Junta – Democracy – Gridlock – Dictatorship matches up very nicely with the 4 phases of the Saeculum described in Fourth Turning, so here’s my riff on that excerpt from “Decline & Fall.”
We start with an untenable situation, and the rise of a Dictator to bash his way through the crud at the beginning of the Crisis Era. His reign runs from the beginning to the Crisis to the beginning of the Recovery.
Then:
Colonial America: George Washington retires after two terms in office. Iconic author: Thomas Paine
Federal America: Abe Lincoln is assassinated. Iconic author: Harriet Beecher Stowe
Gilded Age America: FDR dies of natural causes at the end of the Crisis.
Imperial America. Remains to be seem, but Trump is not a young man.
The Junta rises to power from the end of the Crisis throughout the Recovery, with the battle cry of “Return to Normalcy, with , historically, witch-hunting of “internal enemies), and ends with the beginning of the Awakening and the rise of idealistic young rebels.
Colonial America: President: John Quincy Adams. The Junta: Old Whigs. Witch-hunting the remaining Tories. (Note: the political parties are still borrowed from Britain’s.)
Federal America: The “Era of Good Feelings,” which does not last.
Gilded Age America: “The Gilded Age.”
Imperial America: the 1950s and early 1960s.
The Junta becomes Democracy, powered by idealistic young rebels with no conscious memory of the Crisis, and a clear view of the problems that were papered over or shelved by the Junta.
Colonial America: The Transcendentalists. And the frontier populist Andrew Jackson.
Federal America: The various crusades for Temperance, Women’s Rights, etc.
Gilded Age America: The Progressives and the Social Gospel. (My father was a lifelong Social Gospel Democrat, tempered by Western Pennsylvania hard-headedness and no room for poseurs. Mom was a Taft Republican.)
Imperial America: The hippies, Vietnam, and the huge March on Washington.
The Awakening gives way to The Unraveling, a.k.a. “Young idealists sell out,” and society disintegrates in “every man for himself,” whole the old idealists fall into hard opposing factions, ending, of course, in gridlock
Colonial America: The 1850s
Federal America: The actual Gilded Age. Iconic author: Louisa May Alcott.
Gilded Age America: The Roaring 20s. Iconic author: F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Imperial America: Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” and “Greed is Good” climaxing in the 1990s.
Followed by the rise of:
Colonial America: Abe Lincoln’s Republican Party
Federal America: The Republicans and Teddy Roosevelt Progressives.
Gilded Age America: FDR and the New Deal Democrats
Imperial America: The MAGA Republicans and Donald trump
P.S. I’ve gotten lost in all those details plus trying to keep correcting my typos – call me on any inaccuracies, please. The one period I AM an expert on, first-hand, is the post-FDR one.
Hi John Michael,
Good to hear, and resting the mind at such times has a lot to recommend it. The usual societal arrangements appear quite mercenary to me, and hardly allow for recovery from what you’ve experienced, which is something that few of us are ever likely to avoid. It’s quite awful to consider that these arrangements are put in place for crass economic reasons, but yeah. A sad indictment.
Far out, you might be right there about a second snow free year in your part of the world. Even a mostly free of snow year is hardly much different. We’ve gone from a historical ten snow days per year, to about one every three years. And that was a light dusting to say the least. Wasn’t even cold enough to wipe out the stone fruit crop (as has happened in earlier years)!
Thought you might be interested in this brief climate article from down under. The weather flipped about a week ago and shifted from hot and dry, to hot and wet. That happens, but gets more pronounced as the oceans around the north of the continent warm up. All that heat has to go somewhere. To quote the Star Trek VI film: “The things gotta have a tailpipe! So true. The scale is immense.
Colossal conveyor belt of tropical moisture.
Cheers
Chris
Hi John Michael,
Hmm. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts in the matter, but I suspect that the fast collapse concept appeals to people who aren’t conditioned to consider the needs of the future. Dunno.
Cheers
Chris
JMG, do the use-limitations on the various John-Gilbert-derived courses that you’ve put out in the last few years (OSA, MOE, FHR, etc.), allow for the work to be formatted for print-on-demand copies that could be made available at cost to anyone who wanted something more than a loose-leaf printed version?
@Brent,
You had asked about a second force (the first being the Guardian of the Threshold) that disciplines those that try to walk off the path. You also said something to the effect that being stuck by the second force can lead to paranoid delusions.
This commentary (https://www.crcsite.org/rosicrucian-library/secret-symbols-guide4/) is based on an image called Mons Philosophorum or Mountain of Initiation. It describes not one Guardian, but three. The first is Guardian of the Threshold. The second Guardian is the Terror on the Threshold. “His effect upon us corresponds to the influence of Saturn.” Saturn seems related to discipline and terror seems related to paranoid delusions, so perhaps this is the force they were referring to?
Replying to post #274 and Mr. JMG –
Your assertion of Tamanous is the thing that I have not had a word for in my life. The Tamanous, however, is the thing that I have felt since I came of age.
I attended a Catholic high school that did a good job of educating its students in religious and spiritual practices. I wrote an essay in one class that sketches out the Tamanous. I asserted that the most important religious life was the relationship between one’s being and the spiritual cosmos. I referred to the diety as “The Great Spirit.” I have held this personal religion close to myself in subsequent years. You have put a name to the idea that I felt in my own life.
The notion of an American great culture is fascinating. I suppose much of my current life is devoted to figuring this out and telling stories that reflect this feeling. I’m excited for the journey!
So you don’t want our politicians? But they do such cute tricks like give a Nazi war criminal a standing ovation. Oh well, I guess that’s an offer you can refuse.
You have always maintained that no one would start a nuclear war, but I look at American politicians (indeed, most Western politicians) and think they’re a bunch of raving lunatics. But now that Russia has come out with their hazelnuts (oreshnik), nuclear weapons may be obsolete.
I know that probably most western media are downplaying it, but they do that with anything that doesn’t fit their narrative. I came across a report that the residents of Dnipropetrovsk thought there was an earthquake, buildings in the area suffered cracks in their foundations, and now the area is cordoned off and no one is allowed near it. Will see what happens.
JMG – The National Cryptologic Museum has a temporary exhibit (until mid-Dec) on Remote Viewing. Apparently, Project STARGATE left some drawings and photographs in the NSA archives, and they’re now on public display. I remember reading about that stuff many years ago, but it’s another thing to actually see the sketches and photos, and the marked points of correspondence. The Russians were trying it too, back then, and it’s not hard to speculate that each country leaked enough info about the topic to goad the other into further efforts. A little web browsing tells me that books can be bought on the topic, but what do you think of it?
https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/News-Highlights/Article/Article/3946210/new-exhibits-at-the-national-cryptologic-museum-unlock-your-curiosity/
JMG,
Why do (and others) think the Oreshnik missiles might be so important and “game changing?”
Thanks,
Edward
Enjoyer, my will left all income from my books to Sara for the duration of her life if she survived me, and thereafter transferred my copyrights to several esoteric orders and Masonic charities to provide them with income. I’ll have to write a new will now, of course, but I haven’t done that yet. I’d like to set things up with a literary agency to manage my titles, but every agency I know of is so deep in bed with the big corporate publishers that they literally won’t look at or talk to somebody who’s built a career with small to midsized presses, as I have.
Patricia M, thanks for this. It’s all quite clear.
Chris, thank you. I feel tremendously fortunate that I have the career I do, and can arrange time for my emotional needs just now. Thank you for the article — a useful data point in a changing world. As for fast collapse, I’m pretty certain that it’s pure fantasy — I’ve noticed that the more eagerly people talk fast collapse, the less they’re doing to get ready for it. It’s the people who expect decline who are taking it seriously.
Temporaryreality, for the MOE and FHR, the short answer is “yes.” That material’s been released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. You can get all the details at:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
If you do this, I would like one printed copy of each work you produce for my own collection, but that’s a favor I’m asking, not a legal requirement. For the OSA, you’ll have to get the approval of the organization but I know of no reason they would refuse it.
Mrdobner, I know the feeling — when I encountered the Tamanous concept many years ago, via my study of the Chinook jargon, I was also struck by the way that it gave a name to something previously nameless but present in my own experiences.
Annette2, do you think you could send your politicians back to the manufacturer and ask for a refund? They’re clearly defective…
Lathechuck, it apparently brought in useful intelligence. This doesn’t surprise me at all, all things considered.
Edward, because it allows the destruction of hardened sits deep underground without using nuclear warheads. Ukraine is full of such sites, due to the Soviet Union’s policy of preparing to survive a nuclear war, and some of them have been used all along as secure bases for NATO forward command, weapons manufacture, and armaments storage. The Oreshnik technology allows the Russians to destroy those without having to cross the nuclear threshold. In tactical terms, it’s immense — if the Russians had had the Oreshnik technology operative in the opening stage of the war, for example, Mariupol would have fallen in a matter of days instead of requiring a siege of more than a month, as the strength of the defenders was entirely a matter of their control of deep shelters in the industrial district. One or two Oreshnik hits would have annihilated those, along with everyone inside them, forcing an immediate surrender.
I hope everyone (who celebrates it) has had an enjoyable Thanksgiving, and that all family members got along, no matter who they voted for! I’m now back from visiting with relatives for the holiday, and ready to begin wading through the comments here. First though, I want to ask something about the recent election I’ve been turning over in my head and wondered if anyone else was thinking about it too. While there have been a lot of internet meltdowns, some screeching by talk show hosts and news–um–opinoncasters, and some reports of family feuds and snubs, I haven’t heard about any type of major protest or disruption. I know a pro-Palestinian protest attempted to shut down a holiday parade, but was not successful. And that wasn’t about the election. Was there something I missed? No ANTIFA riots burning down Portland, no women wearing pink pussy hats marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, no BLM human chains across major highways blocking cars…everyone seems to have given up. But is it over? I’m wondering if the protest will gain momentum again, but be focused on Inauguration Day. Do you think that something may happen January 20? Will the Progressives regrow spines and rise up in one last (vain, I think) attempt to sway America with protest? I don’t think that would work, but that hasn’t stopped them so far.
Joy Maire
Boysmom: re: “It is very interesting that access to minors appears to be more valuable to those companies then access to adult users is.”
I suspect it is less about their value than the cost of trying to exclude them (which are extremely considerable, especially when you have to factor in potential court costs if they fail, and the potential for debanking) outweighing the revenue from the users in those states.
In the previous post, I made a comment about newscasters, which I renamed opinoncasters because that is what they mostly do now. I suddenly thought how the term “cast a spell” is used in magic. I know we’ve talked about advertising as magic, now I really see how news “casting” is magic also. Sometimes I think we should just call them news influencers, since they try to cast that word on every YouTuber that’s swiping away their audience.
Joy Marie
Nice! And you bet, you’d get a copy of each!
I’ve sent a message off to the OSA council. Also, perhaps when I get closer to doing this (whichever I start with), I will inquire of you again, to see what you think of including relevant and useful public domain imagery (I’m thinking here of the Book of Lambspring images you included in your original OSA blog posts) and if you’d suggest anything in particular for the MOE and FHR; unless of course you want to suggest anything now. 🙂
I have heard criticisms of Musk and Ramaswamy’s new DOGE, to the effect that slashing Federal payrolls and even eliminating agencies will not actually save all that much money. The critics point out that the bulk of Federal spending is on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, military and interest on debt, which DOGE will not have the power to affect.
I think the critics are missing an important point. The actual cost of Federal salaries, office space, etc. is only the tip of the iceberg. There is a “multiplier effect” from all these public officials. Let me give you a local example in New Zealand.
My Orthodox congregation is in the process of finishing up the paperwork, to start building a new temple. We need to upgrade the electrical power main to the new church, to accommodate the extra load. I found out that it costs seven times as much money to get all the various permissions and consents, as it does to actually do the work itself!
No doubt this is par for the course in other industries as well.
So, if you add up the total of all the salaries of the Federal “lenocrats” whose jobs you eliminate, and multiply that number by seven, you will get a lot closer to estimating the total savings to the economy of slashing bureaucracies.
No doubt even that method is conservative. The potential value of liberated resources is likely much larger than that.
Many years ago when I was but a lad I was often in the presence of two eminent practical philosophers, my dad and his co-worker, Joe. Discussions between themselves and with others were wide ranging on the issues of the day, like the JFK and RFK rub-outs, the Cold War, the war in Indo-China, Watergate, the state of the union movement etc.
Those guys were all European peasantry and none had any patience for puritanical ideas about legal drinking age and so they kept filling my glass. What was I to do? I came out of these sessions stinking but it was worth the pain the next day.
What I got from these talks far exceeded what I got from my university courses especially in economics – there’s no such thing as a free lunch – but my dad and his compadres spiked their reasoning with real-life experience, unlike what you get from award-winning theoreticians.
So, for example, from my dad, a recurring theme in his thinking; that the fastest way to get treated like a punching bag is to be one, and from Joe; business is business and love is B.S., both of which may explain what just happened in the US elections and what’s been happening for years now around the world.
Academics and other great thinkers told us what was good for everyone and fair and just, and so global arrangements were made accordingly, but, as Pat Buchanan remarked not so long ago, the returns are in.
And so, what came of it when people realized what a con it’s all been were various upheavals, from electoral results which all the ‘good’ people decry as insipient fascism, to violent conflagrations presently underway.
To be fair to economists, they have made some progress since I graduated. What was it that Herb Stein said, that if something can’t go on, it won’t.
Beardtree and JMG,
That would be the Hirsch Report
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirsch_report
By the DoE, it said that a crisis could be avoided by transitioning 20 years before the peak, or with great difficulty and a crash course 10 years before the peak, or with huge economic hardships at the time of the peak. It didn’t make any predictions about what would happen if we collectively whistled past the graveyard and pretended it wasn’t happening.
As a fun aside, the German military commissioned a report on peak oil in 2009, The Bundeswehr Report. The military leaked it to the press to get the politicians thinking about the consequences. It had a very somber tone. It had this line that’s been on mind for a couple of years, loosely translated “the security consequences to Germany by 2030 cannot even be estimated.”
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/peak-oil-and-the-german-government-military-study-warns-of-a-potentially-drastic-oil-crisis-a-715138.html
It looks like Germany bet the farm on a green transition to fairy dust and whishful thinking and a high stakes gamble on dismembering Russia to buy a few more decades.
There’s a full German version out there in PDF and an English translation of the summary.
JMG,
I find it pretty amazing that contrary to all polls, expectations, and conventional wisdom, Donald Trump prevailed to such an extent that no one is disputing the result, granting you your wish and also avoiding an American civil war. What’s even stranger is how serene everyone is over it. In my circle, there’s far less TDS after the election than there was than before the election, and people on both sides of the aisle seem…relieved somehow? It’s bizarre.
Were you expecting Trump to win as bigly as he did?
@Annette2 re. colours for political parties: there’s always infrared. Quite appropriate since they usually produce more heat than light.
Kind Sir,
During a discussion with a few fellow ecosophians this afternoon I realised something about the faith I don’t necessarily follow but was baptised into.
Why is Catholicism seen as a monotheistic religion? The main deity appears in three different forms. A bit like in Hinduism. Then there are more Angels than you can fit on even an extra large pin. Not to mention the Saints. Standing room only in the pantheon. The baroque Catholic churches I remember from my childhood resemble Hindu temples more than they do protestant churches.
I don’t mean that as a criticism. Quite the opposite since I am a polytheist myself.
Just wondering.
Hey JMG
William robinson is definitely my preference in terms of art, though his life is rather normal. He is in a way the exact opposite of Brisbane’s other famous artist, Ian Fairweather.
Ian was a 2nd lieutenant in WWI who learned to draw in a POW camp, then studied oriental studies, followed by travelling to China and Indonesia a fair bit. He mastered Chinese enough that he translated an old Chinese comedic novel about an eccentric sage, titled “The drunken Buddha”, which is sadly out of print. He then became a recluse, living in a beach-hut where he obsessively painted on any scrap of carboard or paper he could find, then pretty much neglecting each painting the moment they were complete. His painting are rather abstract messes, kind of like pollack, which I find hard to appreciate. His early drawings are quite decent, though.
https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/artists/fairweather-ian/
What’s happening in Syria now? I think nothing good…:-(
@JMG – thank you. Re-reading it relieves my mind as well, but when I got up from the keyboard, it was like having run a marathon.
There’s a paradox about Louisa May Alcott in that her respectable novels do ooze the Victorian piety, such as the emphasis on the purity of young women and their duty to police the minor vices of the young men. but there’s also a lot there that’s radical enough; and in person, well, anyone these days who’s been around the adult Gen-Xers will recognize her as one of the breed – hard-headed, pragmatic, with a ruthless streak, and the fact that she had been the de facto “man of the family” since girlhood, thanks to her feckless father. That bite even comes out in “Little Women and its sequels for all that her heroes are essentially a re-written version of Bronson Alcott as she wished he’d been.
I also note: the post-Civil-War Gilded had a lot in common with the post-WWI Lost and the post Vietnam GenX – what you saw in your own contemporaries as you described them in one of your posts. As a mother and grandmother, I sort of have my nose rubbed in this regularly even as I see the remarkable obedience of my grandchildren to their mother and the expectations of the society around them.
(Full disclosure – I had been standing by ready to finance their secret desires and/or independence. My granddaughter took the money and promptly invested it for her college funds; my daughter was willing to give them everything they wanted, all along the existing lines laid down for them. It was premature, I now realize. I was a maverick; they’re not.)
And I am NOT looking forward to the rise of what’s now being called Generation Alpha, whose very name will inflate their egos beyond anything the Boomers did; and the science fiction of my young adulthood was full of the “Children of the Atom” meme, in which said Boomers were misunderstood superhumans persecuted by Normies. Shudder – Transcendentalists move over….
Sorry – in full rant mode for some reason.
Neon Vincent,
So you take the doll and ship it to Mexico, and then let hoards of Mexicans into the country – legally or otherwise – to take what’s left. That’s basically where the “educated professionals” hurt us.
JMG,
Glad you mentioned in “The King in Orange” in your response to Neon Vincent. It’s sitting under the coffee table in a stack and will now move to the top! The reviews sound fantastic. I read “The King in Yellow” a few months ago; one might assume it’s written in a similar style?
I’m part of an international Indian Vedic chanting school. Since the traditional pronunciation of ancient mantras, for example from the Rig Veda, one connects with an enormous pro social creode (how many people have chanted these mantras over 5000 years?) . To chant them correctly requires extended focused attention and ethical behavior. I do have copies of all the texts and mp3s on my hard drive (not the cloud) as I expect the internet to disappear. I also have been gardening for 15 years and know how to raise goats and milk cows. No need for fear.
Joy Marie, I had a lovely Thanksgiving with my daughter and grown up granddaughter. No men needed or wanted.
About the election: first, one needs to understand that so-called progressivism has been co-opted for quite some time now. No riots, etc., because the foundations who financed the likes of BLM and Antifa have made their peace, ie. deals, with the Trumpists. The case of BLM I see as a kind of modern tragedy. It was founded in Baltimore by a group of black women whose sons had been killed by police. IDK the exact circumstances, but allow me to point out that police are not authorized to carry our summary executions. We have judges and juries to make those decisions. The ladies had a simple, easy to understand and relate to message, stop killing our kids. No sooner had they begun attracting attention than the Conservative Side began targeting them for vituperation. I think the ladies panicked and then became receptive to the foundations which finance and control leftist organizations. BTW, I will say that I see no reason why one of these women should not have a nice house, when the likes of John Kerry and Mitt Romney own five apiece. I do believe that Ms. M.T. Greene lives in a fairly nice home, and I doubt she ever picks up after herself.
It will be no surprise to this readership when I say that the Far Left, for want of a better name, brought this on themselves. Many of us have been trying to tell them for literally years that immigration is not the hill we want to die on, and Leftist leadership, you should excuse the expression, simply would not hear. Added to that was their shrill insistence on We Must Defend Ukraine, a country which I have seen described as the most corrupt in Europe, and no reasonable explanation why we must keep supporting a clearly losing cause at a time when Mr. and Mrs. Ordinary are just barely making ends meet. Add to that the abject failure of the Left to take up causes which would have gained significant public support, such as clean air, soil and water, and increased public transportation, revival of AmTrack, establishment of public health care clinics–even Tzarist Russia had those–and the like.
FWIIW, I think the Democratic Party is dead. In 2016, they had the chance to nominate an exciting candidate, proven vote getter, and stole it from him. The Republicans have succumbed to a hostile takeover, believing the seductive promise of fun, excitement, focus for your resentments, and plenty of sex for all.
What I would like to see, dream on, I know, is a party or association, self-funded and no special deals, no fancy parties and events, of sober, responsible people. An association whose spokesperson would say on some national forum, Sure, we are the party of eat your vegetables and proud of it.
Joy Marie, I noticed the same thing. The only people who seem to be melting down are a very small minority of media influencers (who have apparently lost their influence) and powerful elite figures (who are in the process of losing their power). I’ve begun to wonder if a very, very large number of people are secretly glad that the Democrats lost.
Temporaryreality, I’d say use any public domain illustration you like, and have fun with it. Once they’re available, of course, I’ll be glad to make an announcement.
Michael, of course they’re missing the point. It’s in their financial interest to miss that point. 😉 All the talk about social security, Medicare, defense, etc. never mentions that most expenditures on these don’t get to the end user — they’re eaten up in personnel costs and administrative expenses. Thus, for example, if it turns out that half the employees in the Pentagon do no useful work — to my mind, a very conservative estimate! — they can be fired and their salaries saved without any impact on US defense. In the same way, it’s been pointed out that if the US government just hired every impoverished person in the country at $50,000 a year, to do nothing, it would cost much less than it does to run our current welfare system, and might actually help people get out of poverty. Thus it’s entirely possible that DOGE could cut 30% of our federal budget while increasing outlays for actual defense and maintaining all other spending at statutory levels, by the simple expedient of cutting parasitic administrative bloat.
Smith, oh, I don’t think that economists have improved at all. I wish we could get more of those eminent practical philosophers.
Team10tim, thank you for this! I clearly need to review the peak oil literature and get back up to the mark on the basics. Use it or lose it…
Dennis, no. I expected him to win but I didn’t expect it to be a blowout, and I certainly didn’t expect the opposition to crumple as completely as it has.
DropBear, you’ll have to ask a Catholic. I’ve never understood it either.
J.L.Mc12, yeah, I’ll pass. Standard modern art — plenty of talent buried under a steaming heap of modernist aesthetic.
Chuaquin, we’ll have to wait and see. The fog of battle is pretty thick there right now.
Patricia M, Alcott deserves more attention, not least because of her feckless father. As for Generation Alfalfa, I suspect they’ll turn out better than that, not least because the name loaded upon them just begs for parody. I remember, dimly, “Fans are Slans!” and all that rot — but they grew up in a very different time.
Grover, not really. It’s the edgiest of my political books.
Sarah, glad to hear it.
My heartfelt condolences for your double loss.
I have one short question this week: Do you consider Little, Big a realistic novel? I am right in the middle of reading it.
Maybe this would be better suited for Magic Monday, but I came across this bizarre little saga that’s been running on our national broadcaster NRK’s news website, which I figured JMG and the commentariat here might get a laugh out of. Also very apropos of the earlier discussion about closed-minded Christians. Turns out we do have some of those here too.
Basically, some random pastor declared that yoga is un-Christian because it’s associated with Hinduism, and the local news decided to give him a platform for some reason. Today’s follow-up is the interesting bit, though: several athletes who’ve converted to Christianity claim to have had spiritual experiences and contact with demons through yoga before their conversions, and support the pastor’s denunciations. Meanwhile, several yoga instructors claim it’s just an exercise routine that’s void of any spiritual content.
I find it especially intriguing that people in the news are speaking seriously about contact with demons, in thoroughly secularized and materialist Norway. One of the athletes claims she was “possessed by a Hindu demon” in the course of some New Age-y shamanic ritual, and thinks she opened herself to Hindu demons because she practiced yoga. Apparently this experience led her to panic and turn to Christianity. The article also says she dabbled in “astrology and tarot” at this time. Of course, I doubt any of these people practiced any kind of banishing rituals or “spiritual hygiene”.
Here’s a machine-translated version of the article if anyone wants to read the details: https://www-nrk-no.translate.goog/sorlandet/signe-sluttet-med-yoga-etter-andelig-opplevelse_-_-jeg-var-en-veldig-sokende-person-1.17144814?_x_tr_sl=no&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=no&_x_tr_pto=wapp
Speaking of the Russian’s new hypersonic ” Hazelnut” missile. Here is a technical paper that was posted today on another site.
https://www.jp-petit.org/nouv_f/2022-05-09%20MHD%20to%20Scientific%20American.pdf
It describes the principle first developed by the French in the 1960’s and then abandoned only to be picked up by the Russians. That principle is a variation of Magneto Hydro Dynamics ,MHD. There are very hard limits to Hypersonic speeds in the atmosphere because of the shock waves and heating caused by the physics of air at very high speeds.
The Russians, building on the French research have found a way to smooth out or eliminate those shock waves and heat zones by applying a strong ionizing electrical current to the surface of the missile. This high current is generated within the booster engine using an additional proprietary technology. This system has been used in all Russian hypersonic missiles including the Kinzhal and Avangard. The Oresnik missiles is a just a larger a faster version with multiple warheads.
In addition the electrical/plasma field surrounding the. missile can be adjusted to create a steering force. That is why the Russian missiles can maneuver during the final stages of flight, while using conventional steering fins at such speeds would be nearly impossible.
The only real limits to speed is the ability of the missile to handle the temperatures which are still considerable ( though not impossible like conventional high speed travel). Here the Russians are decades ahead of the west with new materials on deck to allow even higher speeds.
So in short, the new Russian missiles are huge breakthroughs, based on abandoned physical principles from the west that were honed by years of Russian research and development and leadership in mathematics, physics and material science.
It will take decades ( in my opinion) for the west to catch up, and during that time the Russians and their allies will enjoy a significant advantage in missiles that will reshape the geopolitical world.
@DropBear #297 Christianity despite its veneer of normality is actually a very weird thing. . I am speaking as a Protestant Pentecostal leaning believer. A blood human sacrifice of a a man tacked up on a piece of wood followed by a bodily resurrection and departure to heaven, God experienced in three different persons, that for me in experience come across as 3 different beings each with a taste of deity, with the added feature of the taste of the human Jesus of Nazareth added to one of them. Internal bodily experiences of the Holy Spirit inside you associated with various manifestations and knowings that may include speaking in tongues, the felt presence of the Spirit in gatherings, anointing with oil, baptizing water, recognition of angels and demons and at times knowing of their presence and activities, a variety of miracles, dreams, visions, even encounters in dreams and visions of their presence of the departed, expectation of and experiences of answered prayers. All this present in simplified Protestantism without the various extras found in Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism.
Please accept my delayed condolences and best wishes.
In Thanksgiving spirit, I am so grateful for JMG hosting and guiding this site, and to all contributors. The numerous suggestions for researching and education, and camaraderie in knowing there are others who understand peak oil, declining empires, spiritual resilience and the resultant stresses. I am re-reading Dark Age America (2016) – incredible foresight and guidance. Thank you.
Hi Temporaryreality,
Could I offer that a consolidated PDF of the material from each of those traditions would be useful on their own?
Matt
JMG #150, Curt#166 Chuaquin, thank you for your words of encouragement.
Lately I have left many things aside or done them almost without desire, such as spirituality, sports, etc. Maybe the problem is thinking so much and doing so little.
Dropbear #297
Well, I consider myself Catholic.
Regarding the Holy Trinity I would say that they are the different faces of the same god
Saints I would say. They intercede before God so their power flows from God.
Which leaves me with the angels and there is no answer
Someone also commented something about Christianity and reincarnation. I think I read that reincarnation was eliminated from Christianity at the second council of Constantinople. Personally, I think it was for political and power reasons.
Here is an article I found on the subject.
https://epubs.utah.edu/index.php/historia/article/view/578
@JMG #309: I think history’s verdict on the Democratic Party’s fate this year will be “Suicide while of unsound mind.” Steamrollering Biden into the election with no alternatives was the last straw for me.
And the Trump landslide of 2024 reminds me of FDR’s 1936 landslide victory.
When the “Fans are Slans” meme was at its height, you were still in grade school. I had a ringside seat. But, yes, there’s a total difference between those fat, complacent days and our own time. OTH, they’ll probably be leading the crusade against many, visible sins of the Age of Excess. Which I found exemplified in this afternoon’s monthly check-writing, which included a gift to an organization for alley cats. I doubt anyone will be financing care for alley cats as the economic decline deepens. (OTH, Cat is as much my spiritual partner as Wolf is Ariel Moravec’s.)
Re: “If they hired on Welfare and gave them $50,00….”, I’m reminded of a quote from one of Eric Flint’s characters, a former coal miner, that the secret of a good economy was simply “Just keep people working.” And in context, that meant practical work you could make a living by. One of Steve Stirling’s post-crash characters, entering a lodge put up by the W.P.A, muses “Roosevelt….to provide his craftsmen with honest work in a time of drought and dearth, instead of throwing bread to them like beggars, that was good lordship indeed.” And Steve and and Eric are extreme opposites politically, but despite Steve’s Canadian origin, they’re both thinking like Americans here.
Thanks for your answers here. Note: I’ve been rereading, in sequence, “The King in Orange,” “Dark Age America,” and “Decline and Fall.”
Hey JMG and commentariat.
You are right about that; a lot of modern Art is definitely a “Talent rathole”.
I thought I would mention that yesterday me and fellow commentors Russel and Roland managed to have our 2nd Ecosophia commentor gathering. Despite the heavy rain that mildly flooded a fair area of Brisbane we managed to successfully meet up anyway. Something that came up afterwards is a curiosity about how many Ecosophia commentors or readers live in and around Brisbane. I would ask that if anyone here lives in or around Brisbane, that they say so, and maybe we could organise some kind of gathering in the future.
@ Mary #303 “FWIIW, I think the Democratic Party is dead. ”
If the democrats have enough self awareness, they will pull the trigger. For the longest time the democrats still think it is 1994 and because of that they lost touch with the world around them. This is why even with Trumps bombastic delivery (which can have its own charm), that message is actually far closer to how the average person see the world. Even though it is no longer a thing, you still see folks like Robert Reich gloating about NAFTA and for at least half of people in the US that is still a swear word.
The first act of change would need to be reflection and contemplation. Time to kill the failing positions they have had. Not going to be easy or quick and I am sure many within the party would fight that til the very end.
“Are you spending hours scrolling mindlessly on Instagram reels and TikTok? If so, you might be suffering from brain rot, which has become the Oxford word of the year.”
But it’s not new,
“The first recorded use of brain rot dates much before the creation of the internet – it was written down in 1854 by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden. He criticises society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas and how this is part of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort.
It leads him to ask: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?””
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2n2r695nzo
We seem to be back to the same point in the cycle.
Speaking of brain rot, I ran across a claim (unverified as of yet) that Windows 12 will require a CPU with a neural processing unit for Augmented Idiocy purposes. This will force another round of upgrades just like the Trusted Computing Module did with Windows 11.
dropBear #296 and JMG, re colours–I was talking about primary and secondary colours, of which there are 3 each. However, Bee Blue sounds nice if it would make politicians invisible and then maybe they would blow away on the wind. And infrared if they would turn to ashes and then blow away on the wind. But my preference is hazelnut brown 🙂
We’re going to have an election in 2025, probably this spring and I’m tempted to write in that blasted racoon who ate my tomatoes. He’s a sneaky little thief so he would make a perfect politician.
Full disclosure: I worked for the Federal Government. Yes, I was once a lenocrat (my late husband would have a good laugh at that one)
Lathechuck–re Remote Viewing. Back in the late 1980s I attended a talk by one of the participants in the remote viewing experiments. I don’t recall the details of the talk. However, I do recall that he claimed that the reason the government abandoned the project was that the information received was not detailed or accurate enough for military purposes. That seems to me to align with results with other tests of psychic powers, such as lack of clarity about the timing or location of tragic events. Personally, I think that many individuals have been saved by listening to a “nope” and changing plans, but you can’t run large enterprises that way.
Rita
In re: “Basically, some random pastor declared that yoga is un-Christian because it’s associated with Hinduism, and the local news decided to give him a platform for some reason. ”
The Greek Orthodox Church has likewise condemned yoga on the same grounds and for the same reasons. The hierarchs of that church recommend other programs (e.g., Pilate’s) instead.
Right on schedule (from AFP)….
US President Joe Biden pardons son Hunter ahead of sentencing for tax evasion, firearm purchase cases
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/joe-biden-pardons-son-hunter-ahead-of-sentencing/Y2IIWRLAV5FQPB3GFU4UMHZ37A/
Will he pardon himself, too? (Can he … ?)
JMG,
You seem to keep a lot of projects going at once, some for long periods of time. Do you ever tend to get stressed out by unfinished projects or feel burdened by them? Or if not now, with many accomplishments under your belt, did you in the past? Spiritual development has helped me, but I still tend to get caught up in angst about things not getting finished fast enough or needing to be laid aside so I can work on other things, when I want to just proceed calmly with whatever the most important thing is instead of wasting emotional energy worrying about the stuff I’m not working on.
First of all, my condolences to our host, and a happy Thanksgiving to all!
It appears that a lot of liberal Tesla owners are now either trying to sell their vehicles, or pasting anti-Musk stickers on them: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/29/tesla-owners-elon-musk
This feels very similar to a few years ago when the Volkswagen diesel emissions test cheating scandal broke out. I watched this Netflix documentary about the scandal, and they interviewed this VW owner who said something like, he thought he was saving the environment while also having a high-performance and fuel-efficient vehicle. He was bitterly disappointed that it turned out not to be the case.
Spending tens of thousands of dollars being a free advertisement for a brand for the sake of virtue signaling isn’t a particularly good idea. I wonder how many of these Tesla-driving liberals owned VW TDIs a decade ago. It’s not complicated: the car should be (mostly) a tool, unless the owner likes to be one.
@ DropBear–
My understanding is that the term “monotheism” is actually fairly recent, only coming into vogue with Protestantism and the Enlightenment. Early church fathers often referred to the saints as “gods,” and had no problem with this since it was clear enough in other traditions at the time that there is an ontological distinction between “a God” and “the God.”
Today, many Catholics downplay the role of the saints, but that’s just because of their insecurity in the face of the political dominance of Protestantism. Don’t pay it any mind. The saints are clearly humans who have become gods, and the angels are gods who have always been gods. The angelic hierarchy every Catholic learns in childhood comes from Dionysius, which is to say, from Proclus. (That’s why it works so well.)
The Trinity is a bit of a fudge– I think it was a way to keep the triads which were so important in Neoplatonic philosophy while distinguishing their tradition from that of the “pagans.” It sort of works anyway.
The short answer, though,is that Catholics only call themselves monotheist because they think they’re supposed to. But they aren’t, and, well, they aren’t.
I’ve noticed that you have both a Patreon and a SubscribeStar for supporters. Do you have a preference between the two? Reasons for that preference?
Aldarion, not entirely, but to a much greater degree than anyone, including the author, seems to realize. Given that we’ve just elected Russell Eigenblick to the White House, I’d even call it prophetic.
BorealBear, of course. Every so often certain Christians melt down about that, and they can always count on a couple of attention-seeking converts to repeat whatever story will further the latest witch hunt. Occultists get this kind of treatment routinely, too — look up the case of Mike Warnke sometime for a good example. Christianity has many virtues, and some of them are magnificent, but it also has its besetting sins; a tendency to forget all about the commandment that says “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” if the neighbor happens to belong to another faith is one of the worst of these latter.
Clay, fascinating. I wonder what else the Russians can do with that technology — and how soon Ukraine will find out the hard way.
Gardener, thank you for this! Much appreciated.
Patricia M, I certainly hope that Phauz’s fosterlings will continue to receive charity as we proceed! Maybe it’s time to remind people that lots of cats mean fewer deaths from rodent-borne diseases, such as bubonic plague. (There’s a reason why cat goddesses were popular in the ancient world…) As for Flint and Stirling, they’re both right. If the new administration can break the logjam and provide plenty of good jobs for the working class, the GOP will be unassailable for the next fifty years.
J.L.Mc12, delighted to hear this.
Siliconguy, good for Thoreau! Thank you for this.
Annette2, primary colors? In that case I’m going to start a party with ulfire as its color. In the classic early science fiction novel A Voyage to Arcturus, on the planet Tormance, each of the two suns has its own three primary colors. The main sun, Branchspell, shines red, blue, and yellow; the smaller sun, Alppain, shines blue, ulfire, and jale. I think a primary color that doesn’t exist on earth would be a good choice for the pursuit of political ideas that will probably never exist on earth either. 😉
Michael, of course. It’ll be interesting to see who and what else he pardons.
Jennifer, no, because I enjoy working on my projects. It’s not that I fret about getting them done, it’s that I go out of my way to find time to do them. I know that doesn’t work for everybody.
Carlos, too funny. They’re making it painfully clear that their attraction to Tesla was purely a matter of fashion consciousness.
JustAHorseman, I have no preference at all. I do both because some people prefer one and some prefer the other — also because for a while there, Patreon was going out of its way to deplatform people with certain political views, and I wanted to be sure I had a fallback site. (I also made sure Patreon was aware of my double presence, so they’d know that if they deplatformed me, they’d just be handing free money to their main rival…)
RE: Carlos
#321
I miss my TDI. The news of the “scandal” did not bother me in regards to purchasing or having the car,I owned a few for years that were before the whole thing in any case. But, the fixes they did realy meesed up a good thing. The TDI’s were good solid cars with great performance and fuel efficiency. Then, California, and maybe elsewhere ? , wanted even tighter emmisions. The whole reasoning for that was controversial, which is why I was not bothered to find out the newer ones did not realy meet that newer target as built. The work around, when they were sent in and “fixed”, because my youngest was in college and bought one of the recalled and fixed ones, ruined the TDI. First, the gas mileage was no longer as good. SHe expected the gas mileage I was getting on my old one, and instead was barely better than a gas version at alot more per gallon spent to buy the diesel. SO, cost vs mileage now breaking even with gas ( could this have been the point ? To get rid of diesel cars as the advantages would be gone ? ) And, even worse, after a few years she did not pass California Smog check ( which we have to do every 2 years) and this was because a thing on the way to the tailpipe some filter-y thing was now full. And that’s it, its full, no servicing of it possible. As much as the car was worth to put a new one in. But, either the car is worth zero, or it is worth something….. All this to comply with a controversial tightening of a standard in Calfornia.
I am not agreeing with Volkswagon lying. Just saying before the new requirements, TDI’s were a fantastic great gas mileage fun to drive car.
Not sure what you think the connection with Teslas is though. From what I have seen out here in the forefront of extreme Tesla ownership area, I dont see much if any overlap of people who now drive Teslas to who used to drive TDI’s. The Tesla purchasers, most of them, seem all about status. Like having a BMW or a Subaru WRX used to be. I think a TDI used to be like up grade of toyota corrola, lets have it more gas saving and also a bit more fun. The Tesla is like do you want to be the most up and coming in crowd and get subsidies for it ?
For decades I watched as the middle of North America was gutted economically by history’s most astoundingly witless ninnies who just happened to be occupying positions at the tip of the societal pyramid on Wall Street, in academia, and in government.
Sixty years ago my home town and the town a stone’s throw to the north had between them two steel mills, a chemical plant, a farm equipment assembly plant, a metals refinery, two flour mills, a cement factory and a shoe factory employing thousands of guys at breadwinner wages including my dad, grandfather and aunts and uncles.
And now there remains one flour mill, two dead main streets, brown fields and meth and fentanyl. And this happened all over North America.
And people in those hundreds of towns and cities were laughed at and insulted by the people that inflicted these outrages or who benefited from them through the mechanism of offshoring thousands of businesses and millions of jobs.
But they lied about what happened, as though to exculpate themselves, attributing all this to technological change and automation or to mysterious tectonic forces they labelled as ‘globalization’.
But this automation is a double edged sword. Apparently a lot of companies, especially tech companies, are offloading many thousands of their formerly well paid professional staff because of that very same automation but this time in the form of so-called artificial intelligence. And it’s that educated, credentialled, degreed class of work-from-homers that are at the wrong end of the technological whacking stick.
‘Learn to code’, they taunted. Yeah, well, I suspect that not too long from now that a lot of coders will be learning to farm. Or landscaping or welding or bricklaying. Not just them but multitudes of former analysts and coordinators and managing directors of who knows what. All people that thought that their precious and egregiously expensive degrees insulated them.
Is this the arc of the universe bending towards justice? Or is there a malicious deity with a sharp sense of irony running this place?
Hi everyone,
Has anyone read the “Illuminatus!” Trilogy? I’m reading “Masks of the Illuminati” and enjoying the themes and style, and am thinking of moving onto it next.
Russell
Mr. JMG –
A long time ago you made reference to the long arc of civilization. You spoke along the lines that this cycle of civilization could last another thousand years. I cannot recall where or when you said this.
I am curious about what you are referring to when you made this comment. Surely you are not referring to industrial civilization. I imagine that this cycle will end far sooner than 1000 years. Can you clarify which cycle you are referring to when you made this comment?
~Mrdobner
A few random things to share:
This guy did some experiments over the summer on a few hypotheses on how the Shroud of Turin was made:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-152079071?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
He found that it seems quite likely that with mediaeval stained glass technology and UV light from the Sun, one could create a replica of the Shroud of Turin.
This same Substack author also has an interesting post from 4 years ago, before the 2020 election, on how manufacturing could be brought back to America with tariffs.
___
Bernie Sanders just agreed with Elon Musk in a Tweet:
“Elon Musk is right.
The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row. It’s lost track of billions.
Last year, only 13 senators voted against the Military Industrial Complex and a defense budget full of waste and fraud.
That must change.”
I think Bernie wants to distance himself from the wokes and find common ground with MAGA and DOGE on where they can benefit the working class.
Random question JMG, but I seem to recall a few years ago, you said that Elon Musk had the qualities of a hero in a Greek tragedy, what causes him to have greatness will likely cause his fall or something like that. I can’t find the quote right now. Did you say something like that or did I misremember it?
Smith, yes, exactly — and “history’s most astoundingly witless ninnies” is accurate, as well as being fine prose.
Russell, you’re in for a treat. I read it when it first came out, and have reread it many times since then.
Mrdobner, a thousand years from its beginning, not a thousand years from now. Spengler argued that each high culture had roughly a thousand years of actual life, followed by a period of fossilization and decay of indeterminate length. He also argued that European culture was at the end of its thousand years.
Alvin, I see Sanders knows which way the wind is blowing. I don’t recall comparing Elon to a Greek tragic hero, but I could be forgetful at the moment. As for the Shroud, interesting.
Simon Magus’ Rider Haggard and the British Imperial Occult looks interesting, but the abstract to his dissertation has an odd, but very much current day, academic slant on British occultism, taking it to be a kind of epiphenomenon of the counter-missionizing from the periphery — as though British occultism did mot have a centuries-old history by the time the return-flow from the empire started. I quite the entire abstract below, so that anyone interested can see it in as the author wrote it.
———–
This thesis critically examines the literary oeuvre of H. Rider Haggard, placing it in the nineteenth-century occult milieu in which he wrote, and from which he took ideas which remained with him into the first decades of the twentieth century. Building upon earlier trajectories of Haggard studies, notably postcolonialist, psychoanalytic, and feminist platforms, it critiques and nuances them whilst taking a novel approach in elucidating the religiophilosophical and esoteric ideas which are prolific in his work. To do this I employ the over-arching concept of what I have termed the ‘Imperial Occult’, by which British occultism is understood to be an epiphenomenon of the counter-invasion and reverse-missionising of religious ideas on the colonial periphery, namely those from Egypt, India, Tibet and South Africa. Whilst it is a commonplace assumption that occultism is one of many countercultural movements, I argue that in Britain it represented an attempt to revitalise and shore-up metropolitan religiosity in the face of continental biblical historicism, Darwinism, and scientific naturalism in general. More especially, this was in response to the stripping away of supernaturalism by Broad Church Liberal reform, notably in the wake of the influential Broad Church Essays and Reviews. In this context I examine the syncretic processual mechanisms and discursive religious construction which resulted from an attempt to accommodate religions from the colonies to the Empire as Christendom. Therefore, whereas previously much scholarly work has focussed on Haggard as a writer to be understood in the context of the centripetal force of imperial patriarchy, this study focuses on the impact of the colonial periphery upon Victorian and Edwardian culture and society.In the context of theological controversy, I argue that Haggard took a more High Church, Anglo-Catholic stance, even though his Anglicanism was far from orthodox, and that his work attempted to convey ideas of the occult or esoteric in this context. Analysing these ideas, the thesis is divided into three sections representing three broad intellectual currents of the Imperial Occult: Christian Egyptosophy, Romanticism, and Theosophy. Within these currents I examine how Haggard’s literature presents strategic narratives of religious legitimisation, which frequently seek to endorse biblical historicity. These narratives are considered both in the teeth of Anglican controversy and in the context of Empire, and I analyse how Haggard engaged with the doctrinal controversies of the period. In addition, I examine the intertextuality of Haggard’s ‘Romance of Anthropology’, the purpose of his posited alternative fictional biblical stories, and the importance of the imagination as a spiritual noetic organ of transcendental apperception. In this context I discuss the ‘metaphysical novel’ considered as a source of religious truth and occult lore, and as ancillary to scripture, particularly the letters of St Paul. Throughout the thesis, Haggard’s engagement with this ‘occult lore’ is apparent as a pervasive Hermetic discourse of initiatic religion, esoteric/exoteric dichotomy and a secret wisdom tradition. This takes a number of manifest forms including Egyptological, Romantic and Theosophical tropes. As a result the thesis will engage with a rich panoply of esoteric ideas constellated in a Victorian religio mentis which was born of the British Imperium.
The hunter Biden pardon will do a decent job of solidifying Joe’s place in the history books as a hypocrite but then I suppose you could say that of all politicians. Best comment I have been on this was – “From the day I took office, I promised not to interfere with justice. Turns out, I was lying.”.
The next few weeks will be interesting to see. Since Joe was dropped by his party, he has been a lot more relaxed, also has nothing to lose now. One wonder what the plan is from here. Throw the democrats under the bus as revenge or salt the grounds on which Trump will be coming into. Strange times ahead. I think he will be a lot more accommodating to some of Trumps incoming ideas than many would like to think.
Personally, I hope one day next year we get to see Joe and Trump on the golf course together. The democrats voters seeing that would make their heads flip inside out – that would be a lot of fun!
Hello all, I hope it’s okay if I add a prayer request to any of you who participate in such on my father’s account, who I’ve just learned is getting an aortic stent on Tuesday. My sincere thanks to any who offer such a prayer.
May Quin’s father Bob in Austin’s aortic stent procedure on Tuesday go completely smoothly; may he heal quickly from the procedure, and may his health improve over the long term as a result.
@Atmospheric River #325: Oh, definitely most of the Tesla buyers were doing it for the fashion and the virtue signaling.
I’m sure most VW TDIs were bought by people who appreciated their car qua car. I just happened to remember this one guy on this one show who openly admitted buying a TDI for the virtue signaling and expressing remorse, not that he’s particularly representative. Either way, that wasn’t the best reason to get one.
I think what makes it worse for the liberal Tesla owners is the fact that way too many of them gave money to Musk who’s now “gone crazy”.
@BeardTree, Achille, Steve T,
thanks for your replies.
So it seems like the catholic stance is “of course we are polytheists, but lets not talk about it or the neighbors will give us funny looks”
Now I am wondering if there are any christian denominations that are openly polytheistic and believe in reincarnation. And have a cyclical or at least not a linear view of time.
Hey JMG
I also recently came across this odd book in the Brisbane library, “Discourses of the Elders” by Sebastian Purcell, which is the first English translation of an Aztec book of Ethics and moral instruction that was apparently impressive enough that Christan missionaries translated it into Spanish and supported its preservation. While in terms of ethics there is not much that you could not find elsewhere, its style and manner of speech is interesting. In particular the Aztec use of dual metaphors/euphemisms called “Diffrasismo”. For example, children are called “My necklace, my Quetzal feather”, and legal punishments are “the stick and stone”. Quite a interesting source of poetic or literary inspiration.
https://www.cavalierhousebooks.com/discourses-elders-aztec-huehuetlatolli-first-english-translation
Here’s a piece of good news:
https://apnews.com/article/climate-clean-shipping-sail-carbon-emissions-environment-0c191cb3674e157e66f65c8e58e7c0ce
JMG,
I think I have a simpler explanation for why the Changer chose Donald Trump over Bernie Sanders.
Because it’s really, really, really funny. Especially because the Simpsons featured an episode where Lisa Simpson takes over from Donald Trump as president way back on March 19, 2000. The showrunners chose Donald Trump because, in their minds, this was the most outlandish, ridiculous thing ever. I believe the Changer shared the same sentiment and decided to will it into existence, and was probably delighted in fueling the “Simpsons predict the future” conspiracy theories.
After all, this entity clearly has quite the sense of humor.
M. Martin # 318: of course, yoga is un-christian, and using condoms too. So no Christian practice yoga nor use condoms never never…(ironic mode).
About yoga and christianism: somebody has written about Christian bosses condemning yoga as not Christian…Well, I’ll write according my experience. There are some parish churches at my town where there are yoga sessions weekly, and the people there are proud Catholics. In the other hand, I’ve met Conservative Catholics who denounce yoga as Pagan , so not compatible with christianism. I don’t share this narrow minded view, but alas, I consider myself an un-orthodox Christian…
Industrial Alchemy #6-
If you see an article that is of interest (sometimes only the abstract is available) email the corresponding author and simply ask him/her for an electronic copy of the article. Say how it may apply to what you are interested in.
I’ve had a dinosaur presentation that I’ve made at various Middle Schools for the last 12 years. I use several slides that authors have emailed to me, some of which were not included in the papers, and I use them in my talks, always with attribution. They rarely do not send a copy. They’re academics – they teach, almost always willing to share.
While the shock seems to be wearing off and the apologies and tu quoques are beginning, it was interesting that last night it seemed to be immediately and widely recognized, even among Democrats, that Biden’s blanket pardon of his son Hunter for anything and everything he’s done in the last eleven years has shredded the last iota of the outgoing regime’s legitimacy. It feels like Trump now has something close to carte blanche to do what he was elected to do.
@Achille
It sounds like you are demoralized, that is understandable, so am I often in these times and since a long time really.
Maybe a few of my experiences of mine can also be useful, of these times and in general.
We are a gregarious species as humans, in a society falling apart, of course, I’d put that on top of the list of the sources of unwellbeing.
I have only a few real friends, well that’s quite normal, that I can count on less than a hand, and they don’t even all like each other.
I’d still have dozens of acquaintances and friends of back in the day, most of whom are middle classy hedonistic, either unspiritual, or a bit not so down to earth despite meditating here and there.
There’s sadly no reason to spend much time there and renew old bonds, so that’s falling apart too.
At least a few people are there with whom I can truly exchange meaningfully, and a bit it is even in my workplace where as I mentioned luckily there are pretty down to earth, often nature and agriculture loving people, who are not so decadent, rather responsible and kind hearted grown up people.
The only public congregation recently that I have visited was a few times in the Hinduistic community. In short, the energy is good and clean, the people respectful and humble, and all you might criticise, a religious pedantry and all, is easy to
shrug off.
God knows where and how far that will lead me, I’m too much used to disappointment to be confidently hopeful with much of anything, but for what little I have seen, if there is anything public to go to, this is what I have found, while many other things like bars, fairs, yoga clubs, hippie spirituality are at best where you can learn a few good things, but mostly a waste of time. Not yoga practices in general, mind you, but for meaningful social outgoing there’s little.
I live around Vienna, since recently, and have lived in Vienna always before, a big city with lots of entertainment of every kind, yet the time being as it is, little of value for someone not materialistically minded.
One friend of mine used to be a highly social barkeeper, and has retreated almost entirely for much the same reason. He has a lot of pressure, he is an industrious and in general benevolent fellow, but also discouraged by all the chaos, angry at many things, and he has often bouts of anxiety and panic attacks.
It is also the feeling of being positively embedded somewhere that is lacking.
Another thing apart from the social aspect is self care, as unoriginal as it sounds in this day, it can be really trying to figure out when to be active, when to rest, what kind of life rhytm to establish, and of course also, what to learn, that is valuable.
For a middle class academic like me it is for example difficult to get to anything craft wise, carpentry or other things. In my case I put my card on spiritual practices and physical exercise, functionally in that case, just to keep myself healthy and ready for lifting things when needed.
To straddle all this, the chaos of this time, the alienation, the natural needs of our body and psyche, is trying, it is beneficial to learn about ourselves from various sources, books and other things, to understand those basic needs, find a way under trying condition to meet them.
That, I guess is the task of our rational mind and logic faculty, to understand and foresee what we need, anyways and how then to fit it so that we can surf a better wave.
The body and our biology are very intelligent on their own, but they cannot presume our modern world and its constraints, so we must steer, best as we can, that our
given nature can be robust.
regards,
Curt
Beardtree, Christianity has always been a weird thing. Consider that the Founder was a working craftsman, a carpenter, and don’t forget that the chief prophet, Paul of Tarsus, was a tent maker. Notice the insistence on chastity outside of marriage for BOTH genders, unheard of in the classical era. The very principle, that all, from
Emperor, and very much including the Pharisees (collaborators), down to the enslaved, must adhere to the same strict morals. Pharisees and others among the privileged must have considered that demand nothing less than a deadly insult.
With monasticism, it got weirder. Ora et labore? Imagine the squeals of outrage. Doing grunge work makes us holy?? Also, Christian rites, alone of I think all Mediterranean religions, had no blood sacrifice. One can imagine herdsmen grousing about they used to sell their best animals to the temples but now there were no more sacrifices and the monks were eating lentils and fish. Then there was the shocking of behavior of Christian converted women. Refusing arranged marriages with a pagans? Perfectly eligible girls running away to become nuns. As the new faith gained adherents, pagans must have thought the world was about to end.
@Russell #327 re: The Illuminatus! Trilogy
I read the whole thing as a single volume back in college (about 20 years ago) and found it very weird and very fun, and since then, I’ve found some of the ideas from it creeping into unexpected places in my consciousness, so I’d say it’s well worth your time.
For what it’s worth, I read Prometheus Rising more recently (maybe ~5-10 years ago), a more “serious” work by Robert Anton Wilson, and found it quite fascinating, and his insight about money as “survival tokens” (and thus why we tend to react so emotionally to money) incredibly useful.
Anyhow, hope you enjoy!
Jeff
@BorealBear
About these hinduistic demons, I was told first hand experiences this year of people going to a “Kundalini Yoga” class and running into problems that make them stop (our host has warned before), and those hippie spiritual rainforest shamanic and every other spirituality mix festivals I have visited this year were so off the mark, and even within this year I’ve seen so much damage coming out of it, well, spirituality isn’t to tamper with blindly, really.
And that’s just what quite a lot of people do, with things that need a real teacher, that cannot be learned reasonably within the limits of a seminar.
Another reason to love the well established paths of safe spritual practices traditable via books and text, for the modern day city inhabitant.
@BorealBear
Oh and not to forget – garden variety hedonistic drug fests like “Ozora” or that Goa Trance festival in Portugal, where people ingest an avalanche of everything AND others there offer spiritual workshops, no doubt a lot running under the serial number of “Yoga”…I’m not an advanced spiritualist, but not a novice either, and for all I know, that’s quite a bad idea.
And even more all these Ayahuasca and mushroom ceremonies, that do have their place, somewhere traditionally, but the enthusiasts of our day, they may not really know what they are doing there.
Matt, done!
Both the FHR and MOE are available in a combined PDFs here: https://www.mimeographrevival.com/other-projects/
Since I believe the OSA requires that the course be downloaded from their site (so I’m not sure they’ll grant me permission to collate and disseminate print versions), I’ll just leave the link here : https://octagonsociety.org/.
Follow up post from Curtis Yarvin about how Elon/Trump etc won’t be able to change US government, with additional points:
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/its-not-easy-from-here
He says instead of trying to go BACK to an era where there was much less or no delegated legislation and ultra-powerful bureaucracies, it makes a lot more sense to take control of Congress (meaning fill it with Trump loyalists and revolutionaries – the kind of people who will be in the White House soon, but NOT Congress) and delegate even MORE power to the people you want – eg, literally give Elon and DOGE the power to make laws by delegation.
He says this is much more likely to work than trying to reduce the size of the bureaucracy through conventional means which the whole system is set up to defend against and entrench permanent bureaucracy.
One point he hasn’t contended with is the point JMG made in response to my original post – that the decline of US dollar reserve status and the “exorbitant privilege” means that the borrowing necessary to fund this bureaucratic state will soon become unsupportable and the options are either to reduce it in a semi-controlled way (under Trump) or in a chaotic mess sometime in the next couple decades.
I fired up the spreadsheet again to see how the renewable power holds up in the local winter. I’ll do this again for December and January. If you can survive the winter the rest of the year is easy.
For November we have for wind; zero on November 30. Dead calm. Average for the month was 24.7% of nameplate ratings, Best was 67.4% on the 4th.
For solar, the worst was 2.5% of nameplate on 13th, the average was 9.85%, and the best was a very creditable for November 22.3% on the 7th. Those are averaged over 24 hours, so we did have one bright sunny day in the month.
The longest dunkelflaute was 17.92 hours starting on the 25th. Average power demand over that window was 7,074 MW, so that comes out to a total energy needed of 126,694 MW-Hr, or 32,486 Tesla Max-Power batteries with a total weight equivalent to 13.6 Nimitz class aircraft carriers.
The peak power demand for the month was on the 28th at 9:25 AM at 8443 MW. Wind power was not available at the time, but solar was at 28.26% of nameplate, To supply all the needed energy solely from solar would take 74.7 million 400 Watt solar panels, not counting inverter or transmission losses.
>Yeah, well, I suspect that not too long from now that a lot of coders will be learning to farm. Or landscaping or welding or bricklaying.
There was a South Park episode where a bunch of white collar guys were out of work and this redneck comes by in a pickup truck asking to hire anyone who knows how to use power tools. And they all just look at him with blank expressions on their face.
The problem isn’t one of ability or aptitude but that dirty physical work is considered beneath them. There are some real psychological hangups in having to face the fact that you are now a redneck and not sew fawncy anymore. Some people can’t bear it. The typical route for the college office worker is to go be a coffeeshop barista or delivery driver or youtube grifter. It’s less traumatic to their self image. They can pretend they might be able to go back to the office.
I’d also say something about farming and welding are both skilled trades, that you just can’t step in and pick them up without making mistakes and messes. Landscaping probably has a shallower learning curve.
When all the Millooners (Millenials and Zoomers) went coo-coo for work-at-home, I thought about saying something like “If your job is 100% remoteable, management at some point will figure out they can get someone in Bangalore for 3 cents a day to do the same job and fire you”. But I guess the burned hand teaches best.
Very generous of you to give your copyrights to others. I’m sure your works will be a huge shot in the arm for those organizations. Here’s hoping you get better luck with the literary agencies in the future. A younger brother of mine is an aspiring author and he’s beginning to learn how much of a horrible ratmaze the publishing process is.
Off-topic: I don’t know if you watch any music videos, but there’s an excellent Pepe the frog music video with great animation. I’ll link it here. Some of the imagery is interesting. It’s been very weird to watch Pepe the frog become a sort of egregore over time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJMP7RBsoms
Since a year or two I seriously think that the Trickster / Changer is running this world. For instance:
Three of the most liberal, freest and open-minded countries in the world, Australia, Canada and New-Zealand, turned oppressive during the Covid pandemic. Australia even refused to allow its citizens who were Covid-positive to come back from abroad, and sent some anti-vaxxers in compulsory lockdown in guarded camps in the countryside (admittedly, for only a week or two).
Islam emphasizes military values and conquest, but after the 17th century it lost all its wars against the West. Unexpectedly, it is now conquering the West by non-military means, just immigrating, sometimes legally, sometimes not, but it works just the same.
The USSR, once hated as a communist, godless, Asiatic country until 1991, is now respected by many of the same Westerners as a White, Christian society which maintains conservative values. The 90s could be considered Russia’s time in the purgatory before a renaissance.
I could go on and on like this. The Trickster is whimsical and cannot be appeased by prayer or sacrifice.
On a different subject: Joe Biden and some extremist Democrats seem to be doing all they can to let Trump begin his second term of office with a world war. Those people don’t seem to realize that if the USA is drawn into a Third World War, a resentful and angry Trump will have war powers, which he may be eager to use against them.
@BorealBear – “some random pastor declared that yoga is un-Christian because it’s associated with Hinduism, and the local news decided to give him a platform for some reason. ”
I walked into my local post office one day many years ago and saw a leaflet on the notice board listing acupuncture along with yoga, reiki, tai chi, chakra work, enneagrams, transcendental meditation, and similar, calling them all “demonic eastern pagan practices” that should be assiduously avoided by Catholics.
As it happens, acupuncture is my profession (but not my demonic pagan practice), and I felt defamed. But not frightened. While there are people who think this way living in my own neighbourhood, those who continue to visit me for respite from their ills include many religious people, and I have not noticed any of them being stealthy or hesitant in their approach.
Wer here
Well it seems that more insane things are getting before trump takes office. Apparently someone decided to reignite the Syrian civil war . remember the “Arab spring” when groups affialeted with Al Kaida invaded Syria and started there a civil war all over the country that has torn the country apart apart for many years only after the Russians arrived there that the country more or less remained in one peace. Well the same thing is apparently going on there now. Trump is of course making demands from palestinians that they must return the hostages immediately etc. And rants about subjugating people who refuse the dollar and claims publicly that he will support Ukraine so much for a more peaceful period.
The world has gone insane
JMG you were wrong when you proclaimed that planners in the US empire are logical actors etc, they are even more insane than some cartoon villains that I’ve seen in the cinema as a child.
A little call back to a bit of Arch-druid ‘peak-energy’ stuff. Where I am in Victoria Australia, there have been growing calls over the last few years about encroaching gas supply issues. Current projections advise that we would be self sufficient until 2027 so long as we stop exporting gas. Not exactly something to fill folks with joy.
Part of it is regulations holding back supplies but it is also a case of rig count has been dropping for well over a decade now due to supply slowly diminishing from the major fields. Last year a ban was put in place that states all new houses cannot have a gas supply, it looks like they are starting to do some desperate things to try and head this off as quickly as possible. To try and shift the load onto the power grid… not sure how well that is going to go. It is said that the electrical grid fails in theory but works in practice. But even that has it’s limits.
While this is hyper localized to a single state on a single country, this is a story I have been seeing for well over a decade all around the world. Others states and nations can only take up the slack for so long.
https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/east-coast-gas-supply-sufficient-for-2025-but-concerns-remain-for-longer-term
Another thing, this time global is seeing how people are reacting to the ecological blow back on the price of chocolate. Global weirding in action. But I do have to give it to the article below in putting this into historical context “She noted that 100 years ago chocolate was a “premium product, something you bought for special occasions”.
I have said it for a long time, the decline will look like a rising tide of poverty. This is just another indicator of this.
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/food/eat/difficult-decision-cadbury-increases-chocolate-prices-again-as-cocoa-crisis-continues/news-story/0f6e625834e02b123e1db1f5d81d4e4c
RE : Tesla owners selling their cars.
It was the VW TGi before it and the Prius before that. As South Park said at the time of the Prius, there were huge clouds of ‘Smug’ coming out of the car owners. A giant cloud of Smug from them collided with a cloud of smug fromGeorge Clooneys academy award speech to destroy San Fransisco.
There is the saying in the more realistic environmentalist groups that ‘electric vehicles aren’t about saving the environment but saving the car industry’. If they think Musk has turned crazy, they simply weren’t paying attention to him close enough. Yes, he has become a lot more bold over the last few years but the message as a whole hasn’t really changed that much.
I was glad to see Sanders agreeing with Musk. Sanders has been riding that message of military over spending for decades, he was one of the few in the democratic party that at least had a much better grasp on the broader situation. Not saying he would have been good as President but a few more like him in his party wouldn’t have hurt.
Word has it that Hunter Biden blackmailed his daddy into giving him a pardon by threatening to release a tell-all book filled with the Biden family’s dirty little secrets.
https://x.com/JackPosobiec/status/1863554339232452695
@Wer, What happened in Syria, and is popping back up, is not just a random jihadi civil war. It was actually a CIA operation to remove or destabilize the Assad government called “Timber Sycamore.”
You can actually look it up on Wikipedia. Most knowledgeable analysts assume that its purpose was to clear the way for a gas pipeline from Qatar to Europe through Syria. Some think that was to provide Europe with gas so that if Russian Gas was cut off due to a future conflict ( this was 10 years ago) Europe would not freeze ( that didn’t pan out). The CIA/ Saudi backed jihadis were thwarted by Russian Air power and Crack Hezbollah ground forces.
It is my guess that these Jihadis were reactivated by the CIA to provide a distraction for Hezbollah and the Syrians so they would be hindered from participating in the conflict just to the west of them.
@Horzabky #353,
I’d like to add to your examples, the New Zealand journalist who was (initially) not allowed to go back to her own country due to the quarantine, and sought help from *the Taliban* of all people (whom she was in touch with being Al-Jazeera’s Afghanistan correspondent):
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/29/taliban-helps-pregnant-new-zealand-journalist-stranded-by-quarantine-rules
Note that she even mentioned to the Taliban that she was pregnant but unmarried. They just told her to say she was married and not to worry about it.
It appears the Taliban’s purity laws were less stringent than New Zealand’s.
Welding is very skilled, especially once you are TIG welding high nickel alloys. The below table is for basic carbon steel welding. Don’t forget welding jobs are all eligible for time and a half.
https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Certification=ASME_Section_VIII_Pressure_Vessels/Hourly_Rate
Although production welding is quite automated repair welding is not, every repair being different.
Given the number of women welding in WWII I’m surprised more are not in the profession today. The precise repetitive hand motions you need are similar to sewing or crochet, or even cursive. Good welders have good penmanship. My twitchy shaky hand does not make for good welds.
As for the pardon, the Left is having a meltdown, at least pretending to be surprised at the hypocrisy. Joe may be getting revenge for being dumped. He did nothing to help Kamala, and now he’s torching the Democrat’s credibility. He did say “No one [bleeps] with a Biden.” He’s certainly burning it all down on his way out.
@ temporaryReality
I think the print by demand of the MOE and other materials is a great idea, and I sure will order a copy. Sounds better than me printing it out at the library at .1or whatever it is a page, which was on my list to do at some point. I know that pdfs or online can go at any time
So thanks for getting this all coordinated
JMG, thankyou for the compliment. Further to that is the issue of opening the border to a narco state. I mean, you rub your eyes in wonder. Yeah, I understand fully the Koch bros agenda and the lust for slave labor, but I would expect something like a Jimmy Stewart style ‘just gosh darned minute here’ from one of those people telling us incessantly how smart they are.
Yes, I’m a mouth breather who doesn’t grok the nuances. Yes, I did not graduate from an institution that produces such finely tuned minds able to craft arguments so precisely machined as to make pencils stand upright unaided on their sharpened points.
But still. There’s still the blindingly obvious. So I see three possibilities. One is that many American leaders do not pack the cranial gear to serve in high places for they appear to miss the aforementioned blindingly obvious.
The second is that they do not miss the blindingly and are fully aware of what’s what and are in league with the so-called cartels and their attendant sicarios and whatnot.
The third is it’s both. They don’t pack the cranial gear and also fear for their own lives and those of their families and so shut the hell up and take the bribe money and hope for the best.
It ain’t rocket science. It’s the usual. Money is the carrot, the prospect of a most heinous demise is the stick, for those hardened fellas from down south are not renowned for their long suffering forbearance.
We’ll see how Trump and his MAGANs do on this file. Nothing tells the story like results. And they better do it, because if if they don’t and if history is any guide and it usually is, those narcos could well take them or their near successors out. AKA elite displacement. AKA replacement theory in reverse.
@DropBear–
In terms of denominations, there are Rosicrucians and the Liberal Catholic movement, the latter of which has churches and ordained priests. Early Quaker settlers in Pennsylvania believed in reincarnation, though I don’t know much about modern Quakers. Many other small churches and individual priests and bishops within the Independent Sacramental Movement believe in reincarnation and other esoteric teachings. I am currently ordained to the subdiaconate in one such church, the Holy Celtic Church International, and there are other examples. Large denominations are a different story– but ordinary parishioners very often quietly hold a different beliefs from the official teachings of their churches. This is a source of great consternation for control freaks, but it’s always been this way. Regarding reincarnation specifically, last I heard, about 1/4 of American Christians believe in it.
Other Owen, we saw burnt hands at our company when financial functions like accounting and new business analysis and Sarbanes Oxley compliance got offshored to India, complex corporate stuff ripe to bursting with MBAs and CPAs. My boss’s boss said that partner level US tax work would soon be done in India. And if anyone had any doubts, they were soon dispelled by the stellar performance of the new Indian work force.
The company CEO came to visit and told us that he went to Chungking in China, a megalopolis of more than 30 million people and 70 universities graduating 40,000 engineers every year. That’s just Chungking. That’s the competition.
@Wer #355
In re: “JMG you were wrong when you proclaimed that planners in the US empire are logical actors etc, they are even more insane than some cartoon villains that I’ve seen in the cinema as a child.”
I came to that same conclusion many years ago. As I said to JMG last week:
” ‘A Rational Actor is defined as an individual who aims to act in a way that satisfies their desires based on their beliefs, demonstrating a characteristic goal of rationality in the domain of practical reason.’
LBJ and Nixon were ‘rational actors’ in this sense. So is Vladimir Putin.
Unfortunately, the U.S. Deep State seems devoid of rational actors just now.”
That is the one thing that truly worries me right now. Things are in a desperate state when Vladimir Putin is the only grown-up in the room.
Dmitri Shostakovich, in his memoirs, described Western liberals as follows:
“They became like children to me. Nasty children – a hell of a difference, as Pushkin used to say.
“There were a lot of nasty children in Petrograd. You walk down Nevsky Prospect and you see a thirteen-year-old with a cigar in his mouth. His teeth are rotten, he has rings on his fingers, a British cap on his head, and brass knuckles in his pocket. He’s tried all the prostitutes in the city and had his fill of cocaine. And he doesn’t like life. It’s scarier to run into a punk like that than any gangster. The little angel could playfully knock you off – anything can come into a child’s head.
“I have the same fears when I look at the famous humanists of our times. They have rotten teeth and I don’t need their friendship. I just want my feet to carry me as far away as possible.” [emphases mine]
I pray that you (and I) are wrong about this!
Ok, right on cue my California state assembly representative has put out a statement, that as you all are talking about here, is a doubling down of the same old same old. This is Gail Pellerin, won the district at 66.6% this year, two years ago was 68% – and I know that seems a high margin, but the way people, and herself most of all, talk you would think the other 34%, so 1/3, of their neighbors do not exist and certainly dont count.
” For many people in California, the reality of another Trump presidency feels like standing on the edge of a cliff, watching fundamental values and hard-won progress carelessly thrown into the wind with no certainty where they will land.
The fear is palpable…… Since Nov. 5, many people, including me, have been grieving for what we have lost.
And, let me be clear, this is not about a Republican winning over a Democrat. This is about that the values I believe in and have taught my children – to be kind, honest, civil, respectful, grateful and charitable – have been thrown off that cliff by electing someone who is self-serving and hateful, who is a convicted felon, who belittles people, who lies incessantly, who supports autocracy over democracy, and who convinced a majority of citizens in our nation that he is the answer to their problems…..I heard from many people who were troubled over how to explain this to their children. How do you tell our youth that the person elected to be the president of the most powerful country in the world, is not someone you would let take care of your dog, let alone be responsible for the safety and security of the people of the United States? ….While it is important to take time to grieve and address our wounds, it is also critically important that we face the reality that Trump will be the president on Jan. 20, 2025, and we must make a plan for what we are going to do about it.
Autocrats hope that we will feel defeated, retreat, isolate ourselves and give up. But we are stronger, braver and more courageous than that.
We can do hard things….In the state legislature, the governor has called for a special session on Dec. 2, so we can bolster our Department of Justice to be prepared for the impending lawsuits we expect. Last Trump regime, California filed 123 lawsuits against the federal government – and scored major victories…..I’m encouraging people to gather in trust circles where you can share thoughts, fears, tears and plans of action. Focus on the things you can control – and release that which you cannot change….As Trump takes actions as president, we will find different pathways to organize our resistance. …. ”
And, yes, they are the “good people” as she ends with:
“…As I navigate through the fields of emotions since the election, I’m reminded of Fred Rogers, aka Mr. Rogers, in an interview sharing the advice from his mother when there was a catastrophe. “Always look for the helpers.”
We are the helpers. For ourselves. For our families. For our vulnerable communities. For the future of this nation.
Together, we must believe, the only way out is through. Lace up your Chucks, and let’s get to work! ”
https://lookout.co/lace-up-santa-cruz-its-time-to-fight-whatever-trump-throws-at-us-and-thats-what-ill-be-doing-in-sacramento/
So far not talking about facts, that was about emotions, and she is reinforcing falsehoods about the president elect, saying he is an autocrat, a convicted felon, a liar, and hateful. She says that people should be upset, afraid, and feel they cant expalain this to their children.
The state legislature is going to hold firm on its values of inclusivity –except for the 1/3 of Californians who voted differently than she did — no, they are not to be included.
In other news, as everyone has heard, Our California state Governor has bought a new house, close to his kids private school ( the high school charges 56,000 a year per student) in Marin county, a 6,000 sq ft house. They have 4 kids, so that is 1,000 sq ft per person. And a house that size with all those windows uses ALOT of electricity per person too — austerity and put on a coat and hat indoors for us at .42/kWh, California state mandating dense apartment buildings, whether the local building codes or county want them or not. real example from the town near me, apartments, no new single family homes and less than one parking spot per apartment allowed under California Smart, Eco, building codes as they expect people to all take the bus If the apartment building is close to a bus line, the parking is reduced, which reduces costs for the developer. Apartments, not condos, so the investers make money forever, the people never get out of the rent death trap. How will they retire ?
But this is no new news realy, all the rest of them are doing it to. Lip service to climate goals, no action in their own lives. The green projects state wide are financed by tax dollars and higher utility bills, and higher gasoline taxes. Paid for by all of us at all income levels.
Newsoms family doesn’t bat an eye on if their PG and E bill goes up to .5/kWh and keeps going, or if gasoline keeps going up. Or food. Their huge house(s) are warm and lit up. Food magically appears in the kitchen. And he is going to focus on Fighting the incoming president with state taxpayer money in court.
You know, I would have more respect and less to say about him and his ideals if he financed them with his own money. Like sell 2 of his wineries and put up a solar farm, put his kids in public school and take that and his salary to privately hire lawyers to sue the federal government over illegal immigrants. I have to fix my water system and upgrade my own energy saving insulation and solar fixes on my own fixed income, while I wear a sweater indoors.
Wer #355:
I have the impression (hypothesis) that Yihadi offensive against Syria is a distraction for Russia and Iran, because the Oreshnik strike some days ago hurts a lot for the Kiev regime and NATO. More Russian bombs for Iran and against the Yihadists, some less over the Ukies…But we’ll see. I don’t know if John shares this personal intuition…
Scotlyn 354: “acupuncture along with yoga, reiki, tai chi, chakra work, enneagrams, transcendental meditation, and similar, calling them all “demonic eastern pagan practices” that should be assiduously avoided by Catholics.”
Casually, the same things are being “satanized” by “skeptics” scientists hyper-rationalists and atheist. Very curious that coincidence…
From the Monday Gainesville Sun front page, second headline story: “Florida not doing well on COVID vaccinations,” with a lot of boo-hoo-ing and Viewing With Alarm.” (Snicker, grin….)
Main headline: “Noise Negotiations.” All about those noisy, smelly leaf gas-powered leaf blowers, and al their drawbacks, and the move to do away with them. In favor of mega-expensive and less efficient electric leaf blowers.
Myself, I;e seen them applied to a thin amount of leaves I’d have taken a broom to. And have said so. And to my dismay, I heard one of those blowers going at my daughter’s house, whose landscaping has always been as natural as they could make it. I asked about that; they’d hired a groundskeeper.
Shakes head….
Re: yoga and christians:
From what I understand, *in India* when yoga is taught in schools, children who belong to non-Hindu religions are exempt from participation, because Hindus themselves understand it as a religious practice and aren’t inclined to force it on others.
A link to a paywalled Bloomberg article on the lack of UK transmission lines.
““It’s absurd that Britain pays Scottish wind farms to turn off when it’s windy, while simultaneously paying gas-power stations in the south to turn on,” said Clem Cowton, director of external affairs at supplier Octopus Energy Group.”
https://mishtalk.com/economics/uk-pays-wind-farms-1-3-billion-to-shut-down-when-its-windy/
Michael Gray, it is scarcely possible to find all-electric housing, house or apartment in the continental USA. Every renter has to pay two energy bills, as well as sewer and water. Pure coincidence, just happened that way, I have no doubt. Wouldn’t want to be a crazy meanie and suggest that this expensive state of affairs came about because of collusion.
Cacao is already being grown in Hawaii, and no doubt could be grown in US Caribbean islands, not to mention the rest of the Caribbean. I have been baking as a hobby for about 60 years and my kitchen does. not. function. without an array of tropical products. I would love to be able to buy those from Western Hemisphere sources at prices that are fair to the producers. Even better if they could be transported on New World bottoms with New World crews.
Clay Dennis, re: Russia‘s options post-Oreshnik
That sounds like the thing Dmitry would say. I wouldn’t disagree about the the technical possibility of it playing out like that, but it wouldn’t be in line with the Kremlin’s actual methods as demonstrated so far. Whenever Putin‘s government has seen the necessity to move in terms of geopolitics or war, they’ve taken very deliberate and well-calculated steps (keeping the front lines stable and focusing on attrition instead of „big arrow“ offensives, countering the sanctions with their involvement with BRICS instead of direct revenge, demonstrating Oreshnik on a Ukrainian missile factory and not a NATO post, etc.)
It would be out of character for them to go out all guns blazing. Maybe there comes a point where they suddenly switch gears and go wild like that, but so far, it seems to me like the Russian government is happy to keep it cool and systematic, achieving its goals slowly and in more subtle ways, while maybe utilizing voices like Dmitry‘s (or Medvedev‘s, for that matter) as an unsettling background noise to sow confusion among their enemies.
@ Curt #347
Sounds about right. Speaking of ayahuasca, someone I used to know got heavily into that many years ago, along with various other flavors of superficial pop-culture spirituality. Let’s just say this person later metaphorically crashed and burned in a very ugly way. While I don’t think all of that that be blamed on irresponsible ayahuasca ceremonies, I’m sure it didn’t help.
As far as I know the yoga in question here was plain old vanilla harmless stuff, but yes, there’s a reason I’m practicing the Heathen GD out of a book by a responsible author who’s also endorsed by JMG.
@ Scotlyn #354
Sorry to hear that. Thankfully Christians are a minority religion in this country, especially conservative ones, with little real political and social clout these days. There’s also a lot of appetite for all kinds of “alternative” treatments here, even if a lot of people are atheists in theory. I guess it’s almost like how many traditional practices survived under theoretical Christianity during earlier parts of European history. Still, I know many people in other parts of the world aren’t so lucky when it comes to conservative monotheists keeping their noses out of their business.
I just wanted to say thank you to anyone who prayed on my father’s behalf before his medical procedure. It’s done now, and it seems to have gone very well. He is now recuperating for the next week.
LeGrand, thanks for this. I always appreciate when an academic takes the time to “situate” his/her/xer work in some approved discourse, because that usually means I can figure out what they’re going to say without taking the time to read the work in question.
Michael, the question now in my mind is who else Biden pardons — and who he refuses to pardon. It could get interesting.
J.L.Mc12, hmm! I’ll put it on the look-at list.
Karen, thanks for this. Definitely a step in the right direction.
Dennis, there’s that!
Slithy, as I watch the political scene of late, I find myself thinking, “Okay, how badly can the Democrats screw up this time?” Then they manage something way beyond what I’d envisioned. I’m really beginning to wonder if their party will survive.
RTPCR, so noted, but I’m far from sure he’s right. I’ve noticed that conservatives have a very hard time imagining the possibility of victory; are you old enough to remember when George Will loudly insisted that the Berlin Wall wasn’t coming down, a week before it came down?
Siliconguy, thanks again for this. Reality is a useful antidote…
Enjoyer, I have no family and no heirs, so donating the copyrights to benefit some worthwhile organizations is pretty much the one option I have left. On the off chance I haven’t cited them yet, your younger brother might find these posts of mine worth reading:
https://www.ecosophia.net/writing-as-microcosm-part-one-publish-and-perish/
https://www.ecosophia.net/writing-as-microcosm-2-a-door-will-open/
https://www.ecosophia.net/writing-as-microcosm-3-the-spontaneity-trap/
https://www.ecosophia.net/writing-as-microcosm-4-a-conversation-with-the-world/
Horzabky, you’ll get no argument from me. The Changer is having a lot of fun with us.
Wer, you’re free to disagree with me, of course,. but I stand by what I said. No, the world hasn’t gone insane; the accelerating collapse of US global hegemony is shifting us from a period of relative stasis to a period of convulsive change. A glance back through history will show quickly enough that this is normal.
Michael, many thanks for the data points — and you’re right about the tide of poverty, of course. It’s rising fast here as well.
Nex, that’s entirely possible, of course.
Smith, that seems about right. It’ll be interesting indeed to see what the GEOTUS does about it.
Atmospheric, what an embarrassingly self-pitying wave of drivel!
Patricia M, agreed about the leaf blower. I’ve thought for years that they’re the quintessentially stupid American appliance, producing lots of noise and wasting lots of energy to do a job that a broom or a rake does more efficiently.
JMG wrote, in response to Slithy: ““Okay, how badly can the Democrats screw up this time?” Then they manage something way beyond what I’d envisioned. I’m really beginning to wonder if their party will survive.”
My question is, what do you think the average life span of a political party is? We don’t have Whigs these days. Unless you count those at drag time story hour. So how long can the DemReps last before they each change into something else?
I personally don’t mind at all. I hope both parties get turned into something different.
Also having never lived through a time when a major party collapsed, I’m curious as to how it works out and what the fall out might be. I know we have already seen some of it from people like me: anti-authoritarians who don’t feel at home in either party., but felt closer to one, until the overton window moved well past them. The mental health aspect is one area where I expect to see it in true believers.
Those closer to the center, I have some hope for.
>the issue of opening the border to a narco state. I mean, you rub your eyes in wonder
I suspect at some point there will be a Teutoberg Forest incident again. Or something that will make the few people who can see further back than last week make some comparisons to it. When it will happen? Who knows? But the conditions are getting right for something like that to manifest.
Earlier today, South Korea’s president Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, and then South Korea’s parliament voted to overturn Yoon Suk Yeol’s martial law:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/12/3/south-koreas-president-declares-emergency-martial-law
From Business Insider via Pocket: The Great Flattening is Here To Stay.” i.e. Middle Managers simply aren’t being hired they ay they used to be. Showed 3-level organization chart with a line drawn through Tier 2.
From Time Magazine’s Donald Trump cover issue, the leading editorial comment: “Twice now, a white man has been chosen over a female candidate.’ The writer’s conclusion: Misogyny.
“Misogyny! All the voters suffered from…misogyny!
Even female voters suffered from….misogyny!
My cleaning woman suffers from……misogyny…!
BTW, I think the great lack of resistance, protest, etc, is because a lot of uncertainty, and the anxiety connected with it, is over. The ball – or the Sword of Damocles – has dropped, and the world is still here.
(Oh,where, or where is Tom Lehrer; where is Weird Al Yankovich; where are all the filkers with guitars to set tha tone to music and record it.)
I’m surprised nobody’s made the obvious remark: That now Biden has pardoned *three* turkeys. Peaches, Cream, and Hunter.
Nex and JMG,
To add to the unforced error, have you seen the talk about how, now that Hunter cannot be indicted for anything during the period of 2014-2024, the 5th amendment no longer applies to him and he can be forced to testify, under penalty of perjury, about anything he was party to during that period.
@ Dennis Michael Sawyer, Comment 338
There is another angle. Bernie Sanders wouldn’t have been a real Changer. He’s a phony, a poser, a sell-out and a classic “penthouse proletarian” of the sort that co-opted the American Left a long time ago.
Just look at what happened in the 2016 election. There was overwhelming evidence, in full public view, that Killary Klingon, er Hillary Clinton, and her cronies at the DNC stole the election from him. So what did he do? He turned right around and urged his supporters to campaign and vote for her. I remember how he was booed by many of his own supporters at the 2016 DNC convention for that. It was at that point that he revealed himself to be nothing but controlled opposition, a fraud on the order of Noam Chomsky. So of course Kek, or whatever entity is manipulating the Changer archetype from behind the scenes, didn’t want to have anything to do with him. If Bernie had been elected president, he would have done exactly what Obama did after he got elected. We need a real Changer, not another fast-talking phony like Bernie or Obummer.
David BTL, JMG: I feel so bad for Lake Michigan! It’s a lovely friendly lake which doesn’t deserve abuse. They should have tried that on Lake Superior–Superior is at least as Saturnine as Michigan is Jovial, and I wouldn’t have been the least surprised had it kicked out a storm and knocked the protesters into its icy water to be devoured (Superior does enjoy a human sacrifice when it can get it!).
@ Slithy Toves, Comment 385
I saw that. The Congressional Republicans have announced they plan a wide-ranging investigation into Biden family corruption and other related topics, so that could become very relevant. I would imagine the Trump administration will be looking for payback too, so I think it’s entirely likely that Crooked Joe’s legal troubles are just beginning. If they can’t nail Hunter, they’ll go after his daddy and the others around him.
Thanks for linking those resources. I read those articles when they were posted, but I haven’t sent them to him yet.
Recently I was re-reading your article “The Return of Religion” https://www.ecosophia.net/the-return-of-religion/ because I saw a video about a prominent new-agey guy converting to Catholicism and it reminded me of your posts about the Second Religiosity.
As I was reading, I thought of something. I think that I know which people in the alternative spirituality scene will sell out, and which will remain through the Second Religiosity. Right now, there’s a whole culture of young men who are interested in Hermeticism, Gnosticism, and Occultism in general. Most of these men are social outcasts who are solitary practitioners. They talk with others like themselves online on forums such as 4chan’s ‘paranormal’ board, but they don’t usually meet in person. These men don’t get the benefits of society, so they have no reason to sell out. For them, their spirituality is private, not an identity or a fashion statement. I think that people like them will continue through the Second Religiosity and their descendants may form the ferment that creates the next age of faith.
Contrast this with the upper-class New Agers and the witchy types. They get the benefits of society, they are able to pretend to be standing against it when they are actually just as eager for their turn at the feeding trough. For them, their spiritual beliefs are a veneer painted over a political identity and a personal brand. I would expect these people to turn into Christians as the decline picks up speed.
@ Mary Bennett
“It is scarcely possible to find all-electric housing, house or apartment in the continental USA.”
It is the same here in Victoria, Australia. The gas ban came in from the government with only 6 months notice. My wife works in the gas industry and they were not happy with this. Not just because of the ban but simply because of how short the notice was. Production/shipping time lines are much longer than 6 months. I don’t think there was any planning or thinking for that matter when it came in.
“Cacao is already being grown in Hawaii, and no doubt could be grown in US Caribbean islands, not to mention the rest of the Caribbean.”
Absolutely, this is partially a problem of the issue appearing relatively quickly. I suspect new growers will show up in more appropriate climates and the chocolate manufacturers will have to suck it up as they demand better wages and conditions. For instance, here in Australia our wine growing reasons are shifting south. Tasmania is now a big grower region and New Zealand is considered a swear word to the locals because they are turning out such good stuff.
Long term, I do hope to see Windjammers full of caoco take to the seas even if it becomes a sometimes thing. I can be a chocolate fiend at times…
@ JMG “and you’re right about the tide of poverty, of course. It’s rising fast here as well.”
One interpretation of Wabi Sabi is to embrace ‘elegant poverty’. To learn to be frugal with grace and charm.
Hi Michael Gray,
As to exotic ingredients which can be grown in Melbourne… Up here in the mountains to the north of you, there’s turmeric and Japanese ginger, both of which I’ve grown for years. You could probably grow proper ginger tubers where you are, it’s just a bit too cold here and those tubers rot over the winter months. Plus the variety of fruits and berries which will grow in this climate is astounding. Right now I’m eating the very tropical and awesome tasting Babaco and fresh raspberries. So tasty. Plus the winters are enlivened with citrus, they’re marginal here, but will still produce when nothing else will. Melbourne has a really good all round climate, which is largely frost free these days. Heck, I reckon you could even get the cool red variety of bananas growing and producing.
The trick with Melbourne – and here as well – is that you have to have the water to grow the plants, and some years, that’s a problem. I recall during the last drought when the dams got into the low teen percentages, and head honchos were literally advising to ‘pray for rain’. We’ve forgotten those days, and added a million more people since then – what could possibly go wrong? But then, from what I’ve observed, city folks are enormously wasteful with the stuff, so rationing will be the way of it, I guess. It just won’t be a pleasant experience.
Always enjoy your insights and observations. And the kitchen is the engine room if you want to reduce costs within a household.
Cheers
Chris
@Sister Crow #387 – Yes. Gordon Lightfoot’s song about that – “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is a classic descripton of it. Chilling.
Hi John Michael,
In defence of leaf blowers… I do have one of these machines, however, there’s a catch, it’s a hugely powerful 240V mains powered beast (solar powered, of course) which I use to clean up the various farm machines after each use. I am nothing if not fastidious about maintenance and cleaning of machines, and that’s what you have to do if you want them to last. And that’s the blowers best use. A leaf rake will work much better and produce far less damage to the land.
Dare I say it, but leaf blowers, err, blow… 🙂
Thought you might be horrified by the state of affairs down here in this particular corner of the world. Apparently, just to open a café in this state of Victoria, you have to obtain something like 36 licenses. A clothing retailer requires 27. It’s madness, and sending people working in small business loopy. Victoria ranked worst for business as Labor debates brand damage in Albanese stronghold. If 36 necessary licenses just to run a business that sells coffee to customers, it strikes me as being a very poor return on investment for all that bureaucracy.
Mark my words, the left will lose this state in the federal election next year, and then the state election in the one following. It’s over reach of the worst sort, however, it’ll die back regardless. The state is now something like $200bn in debt, and that should never have come to pass. The federal mob are a $1tn in debt. It may not sound like much, but remember, there are fifteen times less people down under, so we’re fast catching up to you guys in the US in terms of per capita debt.
Cheers
Chris
Re: Mary Bennett (374):
Natural Gas has been known about since ancient times, and came into use in Baltimore in 1818. There was a nationwide network of pipelines by the time Tesla proved that Electricity could travel long distances economically. I knew someone who lived in a house that had pipes sticking out where gas was used for light.
Gas works best where heat is useful (ovens, furnaces); electricity where heat is but a byproduct (lights, radio, computers).
No reason to invoke a conspiracy here.
Hello Mr. Greer
I have been following your Wagner series with great interest, and I have a question about his metaphysics. According to the articles so far, all the gods, fairies, giants and so on in the Nibelungen cycle are representatives of different classes, making the work something of a sociological and historical treatise. What were Wagner’s views regarding the forces ruling this universe of ours, that is, did he have a coherent cosmology? Did those views influence his Ring cycle in any way?
I am also curious as to how you see the common practice of powerful figures proclaiming themselves to be literal gods (or being proclaimed so by others). I am specifically thinking here of Roman emperors. Given that I have recently developed enormous respect for the religious beliefs of the ancient Greeks and Romans and am starting to consider them literally true, I am curious as to what your opinion is on what still seems to me like a whim of the mighty.
Finally, I would like to recommend a book to the community – My Beloved Monster by Caleb Carr. It is a true story about an extraordinary bond between the author and a cat, and a relationship much deeper and more meaningful than most human ones that I am aware of. The project clearly meant a lot to the author who wrote the book during terminal illness, and I am genuinely grateful that he has shared this amazing tale with the world. I should also note that the cat in question was a big Wagner fan!
@J.L.Mc12
Hey mate. I live just on the other side of the QLD border. I travel to Brisbane around 6 times a year and would be interested in attending some kind of annual gathering. If you are going to create an email list or something, please add me to it. I’m on oxymyron @ gmail.
Cheers
Jez
Cobalt, there doesn’t seem to be an average in anything but a strictly mathematical sense. The lifespan of major US parties ranges from the Democratic party (1828-present) to the Youth International Party (“Yippies”) which rose and fell in 1967. If the Democrats collapse I suspect it’ll be via internal schism, and one of the fractions will claim the name after the rubble stops bouncing.
Anonymous, I read about that this morning. I don’t know enough about Korean politics to have an informed opinion about it, but it seems like a remarkable turn of events.
Patricia M, I certainly hope that we see a flattening out of bureaucratic hierarchies! And I agree — what an opportunity for really good satirical music…
Slithy, there’s that!
Sister Crow, I don’t know Lake Michigan well enough to gauge its reaction, but I doubt it’ll be much perturbed. It’s had Chicago on its shores for all these years and doesn’t seem to be upset about that. As for Superior, my reaction’s the same as Patricia M’s — “The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead when the skies of November turn gloomy!”
Enjoyer, I was one of those young men in my own more youthful days and my spirituality remains what it was, an intensely personal thing. Thus I think you’re right — and mass defections from pop-culture Wicca and the New Age are indeed a likely outcome of all this.
Michael, yep. The minimalist aesthetics of Zen-related arts in Japan are among other things a creative response to serious poverty — Zen reached its peak in Japan, after all, during the grittiest centuries of the sengoku jidai, the age of wars, when bare survival was a constant struggle.
Chris, fair enough. That is to say, even the stupidest technology has at least one valid use. 😉
Soko, that’s a fascinating question. I’ve never seen any discussion of Wagner’s cosmology, but my take from his writings is that it wasn’t something he pursued closely; he seems to have accepted the standard vague materialism of the day. As for deification, that was a political abuse of a much more ancient and interesting tradition. It was standard in ancient cultures for certain great figures of the past to be recognized as something close to what the older Christian churches call saints — that is, human beings who remain active after death as spiritual guides and helpers. The technical term for such a person was “hero” — yes, that’s where the English word comes from — and being recognized as a hero was something that depended, as sainthood used to, on folk recognition of a spiritual reality. Yes, that got distorted later on into an attempt by the absurdly powerful to claim the ultimate ego trip.
@ Chris #391 “Melbourne has a really good all round climate, which is largely frost free these days.”
Yep and that is becoming problematic for things like Garlic, without that frost they generally don’t like the sprout. But I have a cracking time with tomatoes nowadays.
Mind you I have been sticking a lot to greens like silver beet and pak choy as they practically grow like weeds here. Mind you I have also been letting the dandelions grown amounts them as they are pulling up nutrients – also make for a great tea and salad. Not bad for a ‘weed’.
I remember the drought here about 20 years ago when it got real low. I do worry about when we hit that situation again. A million or more extra people and like you said, most of us are very wasteful with the stuff. I guess if you don’t know the origins you will not cherish it.
I am not worried about my costs, I have been living the frugal life from day one. Heck I only wear shoes at work! Cannot wear your shoes out if you don’t wear them.
My current food budget is about $25 a week thanks to the kitchen engine you speak of. Rice, tomatoes, potato’s, beans etc go a long way. It isn’t just that but it is a good start. It isn’t through necessity but it is always nice to keep things simple. Using herbs for taste and health is also the way. As Hippocrates said ‘Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.’. A part of this is because I am thoroughly going down the herbalist path now for many different reasons that have been mentioned here over the years. 😉
@Industrial, about access to academic papers:
https://www.sci-hub.st/ is another way around academic paywalls. If you still need research, try to make friends with academics. Unless it’s a non disclosure agreement thing, most academics will be happy to share PDFs and even data, this is the way academia was meant to function and academics who are decent people will still share what they can. Don’t be afraid to mail professors with questions, explain you are a hobbyist who is interested, many will be delighted to help.
One more Curtis Yarvin piece just published and I promise I will stop:
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/chevron-and-the-professional-republicans
I think I finally understand the point JMG is making about conservatives not knowing how to win.
In this piece he is basically arguing that the two major Supreme Court cases of 2024 (Loper Bright and West Virginia) which struck down Chevron deference and enshrined the Major Questions doctrine, will actually not make any difference to the power of the federal bureaucracy and administrative state – ie, nothing will actually change and it’s all symbolic.
You can google the details of those cases but in essence the Supreme Court removed two of the key legal structures upon which the power of the administrative state is based. It is now much harder for agencies to justify exceeding the power Congress has given (West Virginia) and simultaneously much easier to challenge them in court when they do (Loper Bright).
Yarvin’spoint is that nothing will actually change because courts always had the power to strike down agency actions and fiddling with the law on the margins will only make a small difference if at all, and in practice, progressive judges will continue to uphold agency actions and conservative judges will keep striking down agency actions irrespective of what the law says, so whatever – all that will happen is Republican lawyers will get (more) rich.
Unlike the previous articles, I actually understand the content of this one very well (probably better than Yarvin) as I am an appellate lawyer. While it is undoubtedly true that progressive and conservative judges have their biases and inclinations, these people aren’t robots and they aren’t villains – they are actually trying to do their jobs as best they can. Changes in the law have an impact and this year’s changes are far more than marginal – it has already had a large impact and the more cases are filed, the more of an impact it will have.
It’s not a magic bullet and won’t solve the nation’s problems by itself – deep social, cultural and political problems cannot be solved by court judgments since the underlying incentives for an administrative state have not gone away. But it will certainly make a big difference.
Why is Yarvin so nihilistic? By his logic, why do we have judges and judgments – just decide cases on points depending on the Republican v Democratic judges on the panel and who outnumbers whom. Or why bother having actual votes in Congress? Just automatically decide the result based on who has a majority since everyone apparently votes the party line anyway. But in reality even in big institutional systems the human factor still matters (less than it does in healthier systems but it still does matter – otherwise we wouldn’t be concerned about Republican senators rebelling to reject Trump Cabinet appointments).
About the South Korean mess: dear John and kommentariat, if you have some reliable information about it, thanks on advance. I think it’s a very important situation because S. Korea is part of the Western block, and it’s between Japan and China, geopollitically speaking…
Is it casual the political instability in South Korea at the same time there’s a reedition of Syrian war in Middle East? Or, is it a Chinese trick for helping the Russian and Iranian “friends? I don’t know.
In the last hours before the new post, a factoid and a recommendation.
I was recently searching for a town in Massachussetts on Google Maps and, since it’s right on the border to Rhode Island, I saw that across that border in northern RI there’s another town called Cumberland. You may know about it since RI is small anyway. I remembered that you lived in the one in MD, so I looked for how many there are in the US and it came out at 16. So far, coincidence, but then I looked at the map provided and guess where the westernmost of these Cumberland is… in the Greater Seattle area. So a pattern there IS, now does it mean anything, probably not lol
Since we last talked record spinning it seems you have your setup up and running so I’d vouch for this album : https://www.discogs.com/fr/master/169936-The-Frank-Cunimondo-Trio-Introducing-Lynn-Marino-The-Frank-Cunimondo-Trio-Introducing-Lynn-Marino
It’s “local circuit” jazz from Pittsburgh PA with great piano and a female voice out of this world. Original pressing is pricey but thanks to connoisseurs, Hip Hop artists and the internet it has gotten renewed attention over the years and has been reissued.
If some or none of this is new, please disregard 😉
Just a comment…More podcasts or lectures? or just reading your blogs on YouTube?- when I’m super stressed or anxious I only want to listen to you talk. I’ve listened to everything multiple times.
I
I get it about no averages. It would be nice if they pick a new name when the schism happens. History will tell.
Hi JMG,
what do you think of A.E. Waite´s Fellowship of the Rosy Cross?
I couldn´t find much info on the web besides their own website and one can join only upon invitation. From what I understand they focus on mysticism and not on magic, do you know of other orders with a similar focus that are open to applicants?
BR,
Marco